The Looner from Barcelona: a Semitics Scholar in Franco Spain 1960-61

The Loner from Barcelona: A Semitics Scholar in Franco Spain, 1960–61, by Thomas F. Glick, offers a highly valuable autobiographical account of his stay at the University of Barcelona during the academic year 1960–1961, in the midst of the Franco dictatorship. Combining personal memory with historiographical reflection, the text reconstructs the academic, cultural, and human environment of the Department of Semitic Philology at a key moment of cautious intellectual reopening. Drawn to the figure of Josep Maria Millàs Vallicrosa, Glick came to Barcelona to study Arabic and Hebrew and to deepen his interest in the medieval history of science, within the framework of the “expanded humanism” promoted by George Sarton, whose ideas Millàs championed in Spain. The narrative highlights Millàs’s central role as a teacher and as the architect of an academic tradition that integrated philology, history of science, and the comparative study of Arabic and Hebrew cultures, alongside figures such as Joan Vernet, David Romano, and other prominent members of the Barcelona semitistic milieu. The text also provides a rich human dimension: Glick’s experience as a foreign student, his learning of Catalan under restrictive political conditions, his daily itineraries through historic Barcelona, and his early integration into international scholarly networks. These experiences are framed through the metaphor of the riḥla fī ṭalab al-ʿilm, the journey in search of knowledge, which situates this period as the starting point of a long and influential intellectual career. The presentation by Miquel Forcada places the text within the broader historiography of the history of science and underscores its value as a tribute to the University of Barcelona during the late Franco period and to a generation of scholars who sustained rigorous research under adverse conditions. The text thus emerges not only as a personal memoir but also as a significant contribution to understanding the continuity and renewal of Semitic studies and the history of science in the Hispanic world.