Rabbi Yosef, however, said that the blessing should not be made every time one sees a black person – “in America you see one every five minutes.
“So you make it only on a person with a white father and mother… they had a monkey as a son, so you say the blessing on him.”
A spokesperson for Rabbi Yosef said that he was talking in the context of the Talmud, which says that the same blessing is recited on seeing a number of creatures, including monkeys and apes.
However, the Anti Defamation League (ADL), the leading antisemitism watchdog in the United States, described Rabbi Yosef’s comments as “racially charged” and “utterly unacceptable”.
This is not the first time Rabbi Yosef has made controversial comments. Last year he preached that women should dress modestly “because they are not animals”. In 2016 he stated that non-Jews should not be allowed to live in Israel, except to serve the Jewish population, but later reversed this position.
