In my own native Mexico City, shortly before the start of Rosh Hashana this September, hooligans with Palestinian flags arrived in buses in the Polanco neighborhood, where I had my bar mitzvah decades ago. They screamed, “Out with the Jews” (“Fuera judíos”) and held a sign that read, “We demand disinvestment from Jewish businesses; we want them out of Mexico” (“Exigimos desinversión de las empresas judías; los queremos fuera de México”).

Does a problematic definition affect that? It certainly can’t help.

“We can presume that those terms as crystallized in the dictionary are a sign of an antisemitic prejudice,” Ariel Gelblung, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s director for Latin America, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency when the petition to the Royal Spanish Academy was sent in 2023. Two of the organizations behind the campaign to eliminate the negative definition of “judío” in the dictionary are the Latin American Jewish Congress and the Delegation of Argentine Israelite Associations, Argentina’s 90-year-old Jewish political umbrella organization. Scores of groups outside the region have joined the petition, including Spain’s Federation of Jewish Communities and the ADL.

Language is a barometer through which one is able to assess a society’s opinions and beliefs. The word “judío” is far from the only one in the academy’s dictionary that casts Jews in a negative light. Others, like “judaizar,” which means to practice Judaism in secret, and “judaizante” and “hebraizante,” used to accuse someone of being a secret Jew, are pejorative. (Nobody uses them in Spanish today.) And there is “judiada,” which has two definitions: “prejudicial behavior,” which the dictionary defines as a colloquial usage, and “a multitude of Jews.”

Spanish is the most spoken first language in the world after Mandarin Chinese. There are hundreds of millions of people who speak Spanish as their first language and an additional roughly 100 million who speak it as a second one. And yet, while there are numerous dictionaries in the Hispanic world, none is as important as the academy’s dictionary.

Every so often, the academy does agree to change a word. In 2023, a Spanish lawyer, Borja Luján Lago, persuaded the academy to modify a definition of the word “abogado,” “lawyer,” that described the profession as “habladora, enredadora and parlanchina” — that is, “talkative, troublemaking and a chatterbox.” As the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported, that success led the Jewish groups to turn to Mr. Luján Lago for assistance in altering the definition of “judío.”