‘You say that the Messiah has come …’: The Ceuta Disputation (1179) and its place in the Christian anti-Jewish polemics of the high middle ages

This article suggests that the ‘Disputation of Ceuta’ provides a link between the Christian anti-Jewish polemical discourse of the twelfth century, produced largely for internal consumption, and the active missionising of the thirteenth century. Having purportedly taken place in the North African port of Ceuta between a Christian merchant from Genoa and a Jew from Ceuta at the time of Almohad rule (1179), the disputation displays the signs of a major shift in the Christian contra Judaeos strategies. Unlike other twelfth-century works of this genre, which address a variety of points central to Jewish-Christian debate, the Ceuta Disputation is remarkably consistent in its emphasis on one particular issue – that of the coming of the Messiah. The messianic content of this disputation thus foreshadows the central thrust of the thirteenth-century Dominican mission to the Jews, which finds its fullest expression at the Barcelona Disputation of 1263. The article explains the prominence of this theme in the period by suggesting that the extraordinary emphasis on the Messiah in the Ceuta Disputation could be the result of the Christian protagonist's meeting with the North African Jew face-to-face and discovering that the Messianic promise was a subject of considerable interest for his opponent. More importantly, regardless of whether the discussion in Ceuta had or had not taken place, the new Christian attitude towards anti-Jewish polemics expressed in the Disputation's text was most likely inspired by real-life discussions between Jews and Christians.     

North Africa's Spain: peripheral national identities and the nation‐state as neo‐empire

When ethno‐cultural heterogeneity exists and thrives within a nation‐state, social tension and ethno‐nationalist sentiments are not considered surprising. Yet in many nation‐states, various native‐born communities have diverse and potentially contradictory national identities without the desire for self‐determination. In this paper, I explore the circumstances in which ethno‐culturally distinct, peripheral communities may develop variants of the dominant national identity – ensuring that they remain excluded from the national narrative – yet remain part of the nation‐state. To do so, I conduct a comparative analysis of the native‐born Muslim communities in Spain's two North African exclaves. I find that most Muslims are Spanish citizens yet understandings of ‘Spanish‐ness’ appear to vary between the exclaves. I use these findings to propose further steps for refining current conceptualisations of the nation‐state, in an effort to better understand cases in which variations in the dominant national identity exist, but without ethno‐nationalist sentiments.