Juan Tusquets Terrats
Juan Tusquets Terrats 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.Tusquets was ordained in 1926 and noted for his piety and culture. As a teacher in the seminary of Barcelona he was commissioned to write a book on Madame Blavatsky's theosophism. He developed 'an obsessive interest in secret societies'. By the time of the Spanish Second Republic his obsession had developed into a fierce antisemitism and an even greater hatred of Freemasonry. He turned against Catalanism and falsely accused the Catalan politician Francesc Macia of being a Freemason. Working with another priest,, he built up a network of "informants," Freemasons who told him about lodge meetings. He contributed articles to the Carlist newspaper El Correo Catalán.
Tusquets ud The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which drew on French, German and Russian myths in a fantastical concoction that put forward the idea that a secret Jewish government, the Elders of Zion, was plotting the destruction of Christianity, as 'documentary' evidence for his essential thesis that the Jews were set on the destruction of Christian civilization. Their instruments would be Freemasons and Communists who would use revolution, and pornographic propaganda, and unlimited liberalism. In Spain Tusquets denounced the Second Republic and accused the Catholic president Niceto Alcalá-Zamora of being a Communist, a Jew and a Freemason. Spain and the Catholic Church could be saved only through the destruction of Jews, Freemasons and Communists.
In 1932, Tusquets published his book
Origens of the Spanish Revolution, in which he argued that judaic masonry ran the Republic as a dictatorship. He further used the many articles he wrote for El Correo Catalan and a series of fourteen books, las Sectas, to attack Freemasonry, Communism and Judaism.
The second volume of las Sectas included a complete translation of The Protocols and a section asserting the Jewish assault on Spain could be seen in the Republic's attitude to religion, the movement for agrarian reform and the redistribution of the great estates.
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.'
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.
When Tusquets finally became a collaborator of Franco in Burgos during the Civil War, his files on alleged Freemasons would provide an important part of the organisational infrastructure of the repression.