The Crucifixion at Inmestar (5th-Century) and Its Role in Antisemitic Propaganda

The Nazi Julius Streicher, in the May 1934 edition of his tabloid Der Stürmer (“The Stormer”), presented a catalogue of 131 accusations of ritual murder supposedly committed by Jews between “the time before Christ and today.”^[1] He begins:

169 B.C. During a raid of the Temple in Jerusalem, King Antiochus Epiphanes of Syria finds, on a bed in a hidden chamber, a Greek, who begs him for mercy. He was brought to the temple and not allowed to leave again. At his insistent request, the attendants had told him that a secret Law commanded the Jews to sacrifice a man every year at a specified time. Therefore, they tried to capture a foreigner. They fattened him, led him into a forest, sacrificed him, ate some of his flesh, drank of his blood, and tossed the rest of his body in a grave. (Josephus, Jewish historian, Against Apion.)^[2]

Streicher’s account summarizes a story told by a Roman critic of the Jews, which Josephus quotes and refutes as a lie, noting that the story is illogical and inconsistent with Jewish religion (Against Apion 2:8–9).

A Crucifixion in Imnestar

Streicher’s list continues with three reports of the crucifixion of a boy—citing the works of two Church historians, Cesare Baronio (1601) and Socrates of Constantinople (a.k.a. Socrates Scholasticus, ca. 439–445):

418 A.D. Baronius reports the crucifixion of a boy by Jews in Imm, between Aleppo and Antioch.

419 A.D. In the Syrian town of Imnestar [sic]^[3] between Chalchis and Antioch, the Jews fixed a Christian boy to a cross and scourged him to death. (Socrates)

425 A.D. Baronius reports the crucifixion of a boy.^[4]

[followed by another 127 accusations]

These three entries are duplicates: The original event is recorded in Socrates, and Baronio mentions only one crucifixion, which he clearly dates to 415 and credits to Socrates.^[5] Indeed, Streicher fails to offer accurate (if any) attributions for many of his accusations.^[6]

Streicher’s catalogue, and Socrates’ crucifixion account within it, has had a long afterlife.^[7] Hellmut Schramm reproduced it in an article entitled “Ritual Murder in Kiev” (1943), describing Socrates’ report as “an early prelude to the many later, premeditated, bloody deeds.”^[8] These lists continue to circulate online, on Christian nationalist websites, reddit threads, substacks, X (formerly Twitter), and Instagram.^[9] In my most recent search on March 15, 2025, the top result that presents Socrates’ account as proof of Jewish crimes was posted on Substack on January 31, 2025, while another result was an Instagram posting from February 14, 2025.

Considering the persistence of Socrates’ account in antisemitic discourse, what do we know about the story?

Purim at Immonmestar

Socrates of Constantinople (ca. 380–ca. 450), about whom we know little, compiled his seven-volume Ecclesiastical History sometime between 439 and 445 C.E.^[10] The history covers the period from Constantine’s accession as the emperor of Rome (306) into the reign of emperor Theodosius II (through 439).

He pulled from a variety of sources: imperial letters, theological treatises, earlier histories, hagiographies, ecclesiastical canons, ascetic literature, probably imperial or civic archives, and even, by his own report, eye-witness accounts. His resulting narrative progresses in a syncopated fashion,^[11] presenting an uneven string of events, documents, and commentary that has contributed to a tendency to approach his History, incorrectly, as an archive of individual events rather than as a coherent larger narrative with an agenda.^[12]

Tucked into his history is a brief account of violence that broke out between Jews and Christians in Immonmestar (frequently rendered Inmestar), an obscure town in Roman Syria, located between Chalcis and Antioch. Socrates does not provide a date for this event, and his internal chronology is unclear. He places the narrative between his accounts of the Alexandrian riots of 415 and the death of a Constantinopolitan bishop in 419.^[13] He begins by describing the Jewish practices there as “games,” that is, “frivolities”:

^{Eccl. Hist. 7.16} A short time later, Jews again performed strange acts against Christians and received punishment. At Immonmestar—as a place between Chalcis and Antioch in Syria is called—the Jews, as usual, were celebrating some games.^[14]

Perhaps most appalling to Socrates is that the Jews laugh at, mock, and jeer at Christ and his salvific cross:

^{Eccl. Hist. 7.16} During their jests, they did many senseless things. Encouraged by wine, they ridiculed Christians and Christ himself with their games, mocked the cross and those who hope in the Crucified, and then contrived such a thing as this: They seized a Christian boy, and after binding him and hanging him on a cross, they mocked and jeered at him. A little while later, they were driven out of their senses and tortured the boy, so that he died.^[15]

While Socrates does not identify the occasion the Jews are celebrating, since the early 18^th century, scholars have pointed to narratological, linguistic, and legal evidence that the incident occurred during Purim.^[16] Thus, Socrates could be describing an enactment of hanging Haman in effigy,^[17] and as Simon Dubnow (1860–1941) proposed, the Christians of Immonmestar misinterpreted (or misrepresented) what they had witnessed.^[18]

The town’s Christians respond, the resulting fight requires imperial forces to intervene, and the Jews are punished in some unspecified way:

^{Eccl. Hist. 7.16} Because of this a violent brawl broke out between them and the Christians; when this was related to the emperors, orders were sent to magistrates throughout the province to investigate and punish those responsible for the deed. Thus, the Jews there were punished for the evil they had done in their jests.^[19]

Subsequent mentions of the incident in the sixth century simply repeat what Socrates offers, with little variation.^[20]

Being the Right Type of Christian

In Socrates’ history, events involving Jews, most of which appear in the final volume, are but a small element within the larger narrative of theological disputes and concurrent civic turmoil, political upheaval, foreign invasions, and natural disasters. They nevertheless support his larger arguments about the consequences of ecclesial discord, frequently acting as literary frames for the action of Christian agents in adjacent chapters, accentuating the piety of some bishops or the tyranny or incompetence of others. For example, we read of:

An unnamed Jew is miraculously healed immediately after being baptized by the bishop Atticus (7.4).

The Jews of Alexandria are expelled after they riot and slaughter their Christian neighbors in the dark of night, the conflict instigated by the city’s pugnacious bishop, Cyril (7.13).^[21]

A Jew feigns conversion to Christianity and seeks baptism from multiple rival churches in Constantinople, with the scam miraculously discovered by the beloved bishop Paul (7.17.7–15).^[22]

The Jews of Crete are tricked into jumping off a cliff into the sea by a Jew who styled himself a new Moses and promised that he would lead them through the waters. Local Christians intervene, and many Jews who are saved from death convert to Christianity (7.38).

In addition, Christians who are “too friendly to the Jews” are crushed by demonic forces after straying too closely to Jewish practice and observing Pascha (Pesach) according to the Jewish calendar rather than their own (7.5.8).^[23]

A subtle theme uniting many of these episodes is how unserious the Jews are: Socrates claims that the Jews of Alexandria were a raucous, fractious bunch, who preferred “loitering in the theaters” to observing the Sabbath according to their own Law (7.13.4). The events at Immonmestar echo those at Alexandria, from Jewish addiction to theater and frivolous games to ambushes and murders. Other Jews readily engage in grift.

Socrates’s report about the crucifixion that allegedly happened at Immonmestar is but one thread entangled within a larger tapestry of polemic, where the persistence of Jewish festivals ensnare the weak-minded and lurk underneath the errors of heretics. While the reported crucifixion—like other episodes involving Jews in Socrates’ History—implicates Jews, the history is not ultimately about Jews, but rather about being the right type of Christian.

This is fairly common rhetorical move in early Christian literature (and is also used by other groups): The in-group is created by pitting it against negative representations of a targeted out-groups. For early Christians, the out-group is often Jews, but also Manichaeans and “pagans.”^[24]

How then, did Socrates’ cursory report become a regular feature of blood libel literature during the nineteenth century?

A New Anti-Jewish Context for the Account

No other surviving contemporary work mentions the Immonmestar affair. Although the affair makes scattered appearances in historical compilations and chronicles from the sixth century onwards, it does not garner much notice until the publication of the first print edition of Socrates’ History in 1544.^[25] Even then, it seems to have taken a bit of time for the incident to make its way into the new historiographies.

By the early eighteenth century, however, it was becoming a standard passage requiring mention, if not commentary.^[26] Perhaps most notable and influential is Jacques Basnage’s Histoire et la religion des Juifs depuis Jésus-Christ jusqu’à présent (The History and the Religion of the Jews from Jesus Christ until the Present; 1706–1707).^[27]

Basnage offers the Inmestar crucifixion as evidence of the need for kings to “restrain these excesses [of the dominant religion]; and to cherish the public peace, by punishing a cruel zeal.”^[28] The first historian to connect the affair to Purim, he argues that while Christians objected to Purim observances, it was their zealous attacks on Jewish synagogues that led the Jews of Inmestar to respond by forcing a “young Christian” to play the part of Haman.

Other scholars, however, cited Socrates’s narrative for more explicitly anti-Jewish ends. For example, Johann Andreas Eisenmenger’s Das entdeckte Judenthum (Judaism Revealed; 1711) includes the Inmestar affair, which he dates to 419, in list of murders that he alleges were committed by Jews.^[29]

Eisenmenger’s volume was initially suppressed by Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I, but later became the blueprint for the catalogues of blood libel, accusations that Jews engage in ritual murder (often of a child), that perpetuated in the wake of the kidnapping and murder of a Capuchin Monk in Damascus in February of 1840.^[30]

By May of that year, European newspapers, including the Times of London, circulated lists of historic murder allegations against Jews.^[31] Pamphlets and essays appeared that compiled ever accruing lists of allegations from histories, chronicles, and saints’ lives and detailed the supposed ritual uses for Christian blood.^[32]

Decades later, prominent intellectuals, such as British explorer and author Sir Richard Burton (1821–1890), still asserted that the lists proved that Jews possessed a “keen thirst for blood” and were “the deadly enemy of mankind.”^[33] Burton attached to his essay The Jew, the Gypsy, and El Islam a catalogue of forty accusations of blood libel and host desecration, the first of which was Socrates’s report of Inmestar.

The Account Takes on a Life of Its Own

The literary history of the account highlights the consequences of extracting a chapter like this from its literary context and circulating it freely as evidence of a past event. As we have seen, the incident plays a relatively minor part in Socrates’ narrative—and does not reflect what actually happened. Separated from Socrates’ late antique imperial Christian polemic targeted primarily at other Christians, however, and set within a rising crescendo of blood libel, it has perpetuated—and continues to perpetuate—a false accusation that actively encourages violence against Jews.