According to the Sefer Ha-Kabbalah of Abraham ibn Daud, Chushiel was one of the four scholars who were captured by Ibn Rumaḥis, an Arab admiral, while voyaging from Bari to Sebaste to collect money "for the dowries of poor brides." Ḥushiel was sold as a slave in North Africa, but he and the other three rabbis were ransomed by Jewish communities in Alexandria, Cordoba, and Kairouan.
Abraham ibn Daud (Sefer ha-Ḳabbalah, in A. Neubauer, M. J. C. i. 68) relates that Ibn Rumais (or Ibn Demahin), an Arab admiral, had captured four scholars who were voyaging from Bari to Sebaste to collect money for the maintenance of the great school in Babylonia ("haknasat kallah"), and that one of the four was called Shemariah b.
Sivaslı was formerly one of the numerous settlements that carried the name Sebaste and the ruins can still be seen near the town, although they remain unexplored.
Aerius of Sebaste, a presbyter of Sebaste in Pontus in the 4th century
Sebastia, Nablus, a present-day village in the West Bank located directly adjacent to the ruins of ancient Samaria-Sebaste
This continued from the time of Justinian into the middle Byzantine period, as shown from a 10th-century excavation in Sebaste in Phrygia, which uncovered a marble templon whose epistyle is covered with busts of saints.