Spanish Jews petition for removal of offensive word from dictionary
The representative body of Spain’s Jewish community has
renewed efforts to have a pejorative word connected to Jews scrapped from the
country's official dictionary.
Isaac Querub, president of the Federation of Jewish
Communities in Spain (FCJE), recently wrote to the Royal Spanish Academy, the
institution responsible for regulating the Spanish language, to remove the word
“Judiada” from the Dictionary of the Spanish Language.
The dictionary defines the word, which literally means
Jewry, as: “Bad action that is considered, with bias, to belong to Jews."
This negative statement about Jews “goes against the
norms of good behavior. It does not belong in a dictionary published in the
21st century,” Querub wrote in a letter to the academy.
Querub’s letter came after the academy declined an appeal
in June by Raquel Amselem, a professor at Valencia’s Polytechnic University, to
expunge the word. “The dictionary is merely a reflection of the language and
the word is documented in a sufficient amount of texts,” a representative of
the academy wrote in an email to Amselem.
The dictionary recently changed the definition of
marriage to include unions between same-sex partners, according to El Mundo, a
Spanish newspaper. The new edition of the official dictionary is scheduled to
appear in 2014.
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