Violent expulsion under Bishop Cyril, plunder

The patriarch Cyrille, having entered into open conflict with the prefect Oreste, relied on the monks and on the city's Christian populace. The Jewish community of Alexandria, very ancient but diminished since the catastrophes of the first and second centuries, found itself caught in this rivalry.

Socrate le Scolastique, a Christian historian of the following century, records a quarrel arising from a dispute over a public entertainment regulation, then a night of clashes whose account was told to the advantage of the Christians. By morning, Cyrille had led the crowd to the synagogues, which were seized, and the Jews expelled from the city, their possessions given over to plunder — without the prefect, hostile to the patriarch, being able to prevent it.

This is the first expulsion of a Jewish community decided by an ecclesiastical authority without the sanction of the civil power.