A Catholic missionary Bible printed millions of copies declaring Judaism mere folklore.

Evidence

Yet even today there are odd and arcane echoes of older views about the meaning of Jewish ritual. In the mid-1990s, there was a general acknowledgement in the Catholic Church that the Bible for Christian Communities (La Bible Latino-américaine), written by Bernard Hurault, a Catholic missionary based in Chile, to combat the rising tide of Evangelical Christianity, was blatantly anti-Jewish. Eighteen million copies in English and Spanish were distributed in South America, and hundreds of thousands were sold in France and Belgium following its publication in May 1994. According to the text, the Jewish people killed Jesus Christ because they ‘were not able to control their fanaticism’ and thus showed a true lack of decorum. It was also clear that Judaism was represented as a religion of meaningless rituals, mere ‘folkloric duties involving circumcision and hats’. (After a legal challenge from the French Jewish community, the text was officially withdrawn; it still circulates in South America.) — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 880

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: The detail of 18 million anti-Jewish Bibles circulating in South America, withdrawn only after a French legal fight yet still in circulation, has a dark epic quality — a mass-produced sacred text quietly preserving ritual contempt across continents.
• CANDY: 18 million copies of a Catholic Bible published in 1994 called Judaism ‘folkloric duties involving circumcision and hats’ — a startling, era-defying fact for conversation.
• SHARE: Worth sending to anyone interested in Catholic-Jewish relations or in how anti-Evangelical polemics in Latin America re-produced older anti-Judaism.
• ADDENDUM: The ‘rituals as meaningless folklore’ trope here frames Jewish custom as empty performance — the same gesture analyzed in ‘On Sacrifice’ where ritual acts are treated as decorum violations rather than lived commitments.