Hadrian's Persecutions and the Ten Martyrs

After Betar, Hadrian set out to destroy not only the revolt but its root. Torah study, ordination, circumcision and the Sabbath were declared crimes, and the province was renamed Syria Palaestina to erase the name of Judea.

The sages went on teaching. When Pappus ben Yehuda warned Rabbi Akiva of the danger, he answered with a parable: a fox invited the fish to come out on dry land and escape the nets, and they replied that if they were afraid in the water, which is their life, how much more on land, which is their death. Torah, he said, is our water.

He was seized and executed, his flesh raked with iron combs, at the hour of the morning Shema. His students asked, Master, even now? He answered: all my life the verse with all your soul troubled me — even if He takes your soul; now I am fulfilling it. He drew out the word echad, One, and his soul left on it.

Tradition gathers the executed sages into the account of the Ten Martyrs: among them Rabbi Yishmael ben Elisha, Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel, Rabbi Chanina ben Teradyon and Rabbi Yehuda ben Bava. They did not all live at the same time; the midrash and the poem Eleh Ezkerah, recited on Yom Kippur, bring them into one chorus — not as chronicle but as monument.