The greatest blow Alexandrian Jews received was during the Byzantine Empire rule and the rise of a new state religion: Christianity. There was an expulsion of a large amount of Jews from Alexandria (the so-called "Alexandria Expulsion") in 414 or 415 A.D. by Saint Cyril, following a number of controversies, including threats from Cyril and supposedly (according to Christian historian Socrates Scholasticus) a Jewish-led massacre in response. Later violence took on a decidedly anti-Semitic context with calls for ethnic cleansing. Before that time, state/religious-sanctioned claims of a Jewish pariah were not common. In The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon describes the Alexandria pogrom: