Juan Tusquets Terrats

Juan Tusquets Terrats (March 31, 1901 – October 25, 1998) was a Spanish priest, author of the best selling book Orígenes de la revolución española. Turned into a fierce antisemite and even fiercer antimasonic polemicist during the Spanish Second Republic, he became one of the main disseminators of the "contubernio judeomasónico" conspiracy theory in that period.

Life, influence and anti-semitism He was born in Barcelona on March 31, 1901, into a wealthy banking family of the Catalan bourgeoisie. His father was a descendant of Jewish bankers, a Catalan nationalist, and a friend of Francesc Cambó. His mother came from the Milà family, who had been the patrons of Gaudí. In his adolescence, Tusquets was a militant Catalan nationalist. Following his secondary education at a Jesuit school, he attended the University of Louvain, but transferred to the Pontifical University in Tarragona following the death of his father, where he completed his doctorate on Ramon Llull.

Tusquets was ordained in 1926 and noted for his piety and culture. The process of his ordination was accelerated, allowing him to avoid military service.

In 1933, Tusquets was invited by the International Anti-masonic Association to visit a newly established concentration camp in southern Germany: Dachau. Afterward, he wrote, "they did it to show what we had to do in Spain." He later claimed to have been shocked by what he saw - 'at the time however the flow and intensity of his anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic publications did not abate.'

In his assessment of Tusquets, historian Paul Preston wrote "Tusquets would come to have influence within the Spanish Right and specifically over Franco, who enthusiastically devoured Tusquets' antisemitic and anti-Masonic diatribes." Ramón Serrano Suñer, Franco's brother-in-law and right-hand man, 1937-42 would later praise Tusquet's contribution to "the creation of the atmosphere which led to the national uprising". Tusquets was on the periphery of the military plot against the Republic further through his links with Catalan Carlists. Two of his brothers, Jaume and Manuel, were killed on 19 July 1939 during the initial coup attempt which led to the Spanish Civil War. Tusquets fled Republican-controlled Spain on a false Portuguese passport, eventually reaching Nationalist-controlled territory through France.

When Tusquets finally became a collaborator of Franco and General Emilio Mola in Burgos during the Civil War, his files on alleged Freemasons would provide an important part of the organisational infrastructure of the repression.

Books Masones y Pacifistas, Burgos, 1939. Los sin Dios en Rusia Ediciones antisectarias, vol. VI Ramón Lull, pedagogo de la Cristiandad, Consejo superior de investigaciones científicas, Instituto San José de Calasanz, 1954. Apports hispaniques à la philosophie chrétienne de l'Occident, with Joaquin Carreras Artau Orígenes de la revolución española, Editorial Vilamala, Barcelona, 1932 [English translation: "Origins of the Spanish Revolution," Uthwita Press, New Orleans, 2023]