ABSTRACT
Two inquiries traverse this article. First, a monographic study of Catalan philosemitism explores the nationalist articulation that relates the features and fate of the Catalans with those of the Jews. This part examines the historical roots and ideological aspects of the affinity of a certain sector of Catalanism with Israel and the Jewish people. Second, the article speculates about the possible relationship between Catalonia’s nation-building process and the temporality of Jewish messianism. This link serves as an occasion to reflect on the emancipatory potential of Jewish messianism not only for Catalanism but also for other collective struggles against today’s global power based on the fusion of nation states and corporate capitalism. The Lévinasian notion of universalist particularism allows me to articulate this emancipatory content. In this respect, my aim is to utilize Catalan philosemitism as a space of enunciation of a theoretical problem: that of universalist particularism. The tension produced by the seeming unrelatedness of the two parts of the article is itself a sign of the conflictive nature of universalist particularism. The article finally proposes to illustrate this notion with a specific practice that combines minority languages and the figure of the global immigrant.
