The representative body of Spanish Jews has renewed efforts to have a word that is insulting to Jews removed from the official national dictionary.

Isaac Querub, president of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Spain (FCJE), has written to the Royal Spanish Academy, the institution responsible for the official dictionary of Spanish language, asking for the removal of the word “Judiada”.

The word is defined in the dictionary as: “Bad action that is considered, with bias, to belong to Jews.”

According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Mr Querub wrote that the pejorative term “…goes against the norms of good behaviour. It does not belong in a dictionary published in the 21st century.”

Mr Querub wrote the letter after the academy declined an appeal in June by Raquel Amselem, a professor at Valencia’s Polytechnic University, to remove 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 Ms Amselem.