ON UNIVERSALIST PARTICULARISM: THE CATALANS AND THE JEWS

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Notes

1. Translations from Catalan are mine unless indicated otherwise.

2. Llobera has gathered this list of features summarizing Almirall's theses (77). For a good summary of the literature on the Catalan Volkgeist, see Llobera (64–81).

3. For a study of the 1936 Popular Olympics, see Pujadas and Santacana. For information on Zionist activity in Barcelona during the 1930s, see Avni (40–52).

4. Benet's book remains the most comprehensive study of Franco's linguistic persecution. See also Solé i Sabaté. For specific studies of Franco's policies toward the Jews, see Avni and Marquina and Ospina. See also the collection of essays edited by Macías, Moreno Koch, and Izquierdo Benito.

5. Vilarós-Soler offers a suggestive reading of Primera història vis-à-vis the figure of the converso-marrano.

6. Gallofré explains the vicissitudes of the first edition of Primera història, which was the first Catalan play authorized by Francoism. Censor Manuel Sancho Millán reported that there was nada censurable (347) in it. In the late 1960s, when the play had become a symbol of Catalan resistance, another censor was astounded to see that the play had been authorized in 1948, which indicates that the first censor probably did not understand a single sentence (347–49).

7. For more information on Marta Mata's pedagogic renovation, seehttp://www.martamata.cat.

8. Raymond Williams's term “structure of feeling” (this “social experience … taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating” [132]) describes well this first stage of Catalan philosemitism. As we will see below, “ideology” or “discourse” can be more adequate terms to describe the phenomenon at a later stage, after Jordi Pujol gave political form to it.

9. In 2007, Pujol was awarded the prize Samuel Toledano in Jerusalem for his long involvement with the Jewish people. In his speech, he acknowledged Espriu as a vital source of his philo-Semitism (“De Sepharad a Israel”).

10. For an analysis of the relation between Maimonides and Cohen, see Kavka (66–128). See also Twersky.

11. I follow Pierre Bouretz’ brief summary of this note (173). Bouretz, however, does not refer to the different implications of the two typologies of 1919 and 1959.

12. The other key figures here are naturally Franz Rosenzweig and Scholem's close friend Walter Benjamin. Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption, from 1919, and Benjamin's 1940 essay “On the Concept of History” retrieve the catastrophic aspect of Jewish messianism against the narrative of the Enlightenment. For a study of the three thinkers vis-à-vis the Enlightenment theory of progress, see Mosès.

13. The last part of this question reformulates a question that Derrida poses to Heidegger regarding Revelation (“Marx & Sons” 268). Caputo offers an excellent analysis of religious motifs in Derrida; regarding the messianic, see 117–59. See also Derrida, “Marx & Sons” 248–256.

14. For a study of the restructuring of nation-states vis-à-vis globalization, see Sassen.

15. For a rejection of pujolisme by the new Catalan independentism, see López Bofill (95–7).