Jewish Ritual Murder: The Imnestar Case (415/416 A.D.)

Something that I have had a lot of readers request that I cover is the subject of jewish ritual murder (aka the so-called ‘blood libel’) and while I have covered the first known case of jewish ritual murder mentioned in the ancient sources which occurred circa 168 B.C. when King Antiochus IV Epiphanes of the Seleucid Empire seized Jerusalem from the jews and found a Greek man in the Temple of Solomon who was being prepared for a human sacrifice the story of which was then transmitted to us via the jewish writer Josephus in response to the Greek writer Apion of Alexandria.

In that article I demonstrated at length that this story was not at all as fanciful or silly as modern historians and jews are desperate to claim and that it actually makes a large amount of sense in the context of modern scholarship about the origins of what we may call the ‘Cult of Yahweh’ within Canaanite paganism; who did practice human sacrifice and the details given to us by Apion and Josephus match just such practices that are also mentioned as being engaged in by jews in the Tanakh around this time. (1)

The next major jewish ritual murder we know about occurs in the Syrian town of Imnestar near the city of Antioch in 415/416 A.D.

We are told by our source - the Christian historian Socrates Scholasticus - that:

‘Soon afterwards the Jews renewed their malevolent and impious practices against the Christians and drew down upon themselves deserved punishment. At a place named Imnestar, situated between Chalcis and Antioch in Syria, the Jews were amusing themselves in their usual way with a variety of sports. In this way they indulged in many absurdities, and at length impelled by drunkenness they were guilty of scoffing at Christians and even Christ himself; and in derision of the cross and those who put their trust in the Crucified One, they seized a Christian boy, and having brought him to a cross, began to laugh and sneer at him. But in a little while becoming so transported with fury, they scourged the child until he died under their hands. This conduct occasioned a sharp conflict between them and the Christians; as soon as the emperors were informed of the circumstance, they issued orders to the governor of the province to find out and punish the delinquents. And thus the Jewish inhabitants of this place paid the penalty for the wickedness they had committed in their impious sport.’ (2)

Socrates’ narrative from his ‘Ecclesiastical History’ has often been claimed to have been – incorrectly in my view and that of Langmuir – (3) a sort of ‘script’ for the ‘first’ medieval jewish ritual murder accusation which occurred in the English city of Norwich in 1144 A.D. (4)

The typical response has long been to simply dismiss Socrates’ narrative as the fanciful ravings of a Christian fanatic and to blame the Christians of Syria (and the Byzantine/Roman Empire) for ‘persecuting the jews’ too much.

For example, the ‘Jewish Virtual Library’ claims that:

‘When Christianity became the state religion, the position of the Jews of Antioch deteriorated. The Jews of Imnestar were accused of having crucified a Christian boy on the feast of Purim, and the Antiochian Christians destroyed the synagogue (423 C.E.). When the emperor Theodosius II restored it, he was rebuked by Simon Stylites and refrained from defending the Jews.’ (5)

While the jewish writer Bernard Lazare in his widely read 1894 book ‘Anti-Semitism: Its History and Causes’ is more explicit in simply blaming the Christians for ‘persecuting the jews’ and completely exonerates the jews on no evidence whatsoever:

‘In the cities, monks and bishops denounced pagans and Jews, inciting against them the Christian populace and leading fanatical mobs in assaults upon temples and synagogues. Under Theodosius I, and under Arcadius, synagogues were burned at Rome and at Callinicus, in Mesopotamia. Under Theodosius II, at Alexandria, St. Cyril stirred up the mob, hermits invaded the city, massacred all the Jews and pagans they met, assassinated Hypathia, plundered synagogues, set the libraries on fire, defying the efforts of the prefect Orestes whom the emperor later disavowed. At Imnestar, near Antioch, Simon, the ascetic, acts likewise, and under Zeno similar scenes are enacted at Antioch. A fury of destruction takes possession of the Christians; one might say, they wish to destroy all traces of the old world to prepare the sweet reign of Christ.’ (6)

This sort of analysis has been echoed for decades by jewish scholars who have routinely denied or sought to minimize the incident at Imnestar with the prominent and prolific British jewish historian Cecil Roth claiming it was a ‘libel’ (i.e., a false claim) (7) and nor was he alone in doing so. (8)

However this jewish historical narrative has long been questioned by non-jewish historians who have argued that the incident at Imnestar was quite genuine as we have every reason to think it was and no actual objection to its historicity – (9) well other than trying to claiming it was/is ‘anti-Semitism’ to do anything else but dismiss it as ‘the product of anti-Semitic prejudice/the anti-Semitic imagination’ – with even an extremely pro-jewish gentile scholar like Langmuir declaring his agnosticism on the issue to get around the fact that he couldn’t find evidence to deny that it had happened. (10)

The motivation for such denial is not difficult to find in that the incident at Imnestar was mentioned at least once in Julius Streicher’s famous and popular anti-Semitic ‘Der Sturmer’ (11) and jewish historians like Roth tended to suppress any unflattering information to jews in their works for fear of provoking/validating anti-Semitism. (12)

The reason why this was necessary is that we know the jews of Imnestar were actually using the Christian boy as a living effigy of the evil character of Haman from the Book of Esther (13) where – as a celebration for Purim – the jews secured the Christian boy to a cross whereupon they began verbally degrading him and them proceeded to scourge/whip him until he was dead. Despite being little known such incidents of extreme anti-Christian violence and/or desecration have a long history among the jews especially around the jewish religious holiday of Purim as Horowitz has extensively documented. (14)

Indeed, strong evidence that this sort of event was a common enough occurrence is provided by an edict of the Byzantine Emperor Theodosius II who in 408 A.D. instructed all the governors of the provinces of the Roman Empire to:

‘Prohibit the Jews from setting fire to Aman in memory of his past punishment, in a certain ceremony of their festival, and from burning sacrilegious intent a form made to resemble the saint cross in contempt of the Christian faith.’ (15)

Now Theodosius’ edict occurs only 7-8 years before the incident in 415/416 A.D. and we can clearly see that jews were engaging in strident and obviously deliberately sacrilegious anti-Christian behaviour regarding strapping replicas of ‘Aman’ (= Haman) to crosses and – in Theodosius’ edict setting fire to them, but in the Imnestar incident scourging/whipping the Haman effigy which in this case was a living Christian.

The two sources tally in that they mention similar events, occur within a few years of each other and give a plausible explanation and motivation for what the jews of Imnestar were doing. Nor is it reasonable – as some have argued – (16) to claim that jews ‘mistakenly killed’ the boy ‘because they were drunk’ since we have no evidence that they either drunk at the time – although it is quite possible because of the Purim festivities – nor that they didn’t intend to kill the boy the in the first place other than a possible inference from Socrates statement that they were ‘so transported with fury’ since this is merely surmise.

In truth then the Imnestar incident of 415/416 A.D. – while it doesn’t look like a classic jewish ritual murder of the late medieval era – was the second major incident of jewish ritual murder that we know about after the incident in Jerusalem in 168 B.C. mentioned by Apion of Alexandria and Josephus.

References

(1) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/reconstructing-the-first-jewish-ritual

(2) Socrates Scholasticus, Ecc. Hist., 7:16

(3) Gavin Langmuir, 1984, ‘Thomas of Monmouth: Detector of Ritual Murder’, pp. 10-12 in Alan Dundes (Ed.), 1991, ‘The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore’, 1st Edition, University of Wisconsin Press: Madison

(4) Ibid., pp. 10-11; Darren O’Brien, 2011, ‘The Pinnacle of Hatred: The Blood Libel and the Jews’, 1st Edition, The Hebrew University Magnes Press: Jerusalem, pp. 111-15

(5) https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/antioch

(6) Bernard Lazare, 1903, [1894], ‘Anti-Semitism: Its History and Causes’, 1st Edition, The International Library: New York, p. 76

(7) Cecil Roth, 1935, ‘The Ritual Murder Libel and the Jew: The Report by Cardinal Lorenzo Ganganelli (Pope Clement XIV)’, 1st Edition, The Woburn Press: London, p. 15, n. 3

(8)Langmuir, Op. Cit., p. 10; Elliot Horowitz, 2007, ‘Reckless Rites: Purim and the History of Jewish Violence’, 1st Edition, Princeton University Press: Princeton, pp. 17-18

(9) Langmuir, Op. Cit., p. 10

(10) Ibid.

(11) Philip de Vier, 2001, ‘Blood Ritual: An Investigative Report Examining a Certain Series of Cultic Murder Cases’, 1st Edition, National Vanguard Books: Hillsboro, p. 77

(12) Horowitz, Op. Cit., pp. 150-151

(13) Langmuir, Op. Cit., p. 10

(14) Horowitz, Op. Cit., pp. 149-185

(15) Quoted in Ibid., p. 17

(16) Langmuir, Op. Cit., p. 10