My brief reference to rabbis on the radio in Gray Matter on January 5 provoked anger among some of those to whom any mention of the Jewish religion is a cause for direst suspicion.

Actually, it was not just anger but “outrage” to Margot Oakenby, who wrote to the editor last week to report this extreme emotion.

The Rev Peter Hewis, meanwhile, writing as chairman of the Oxford Council of Christians and Jews, accused me — doubtless in a spirit of the greatest Christian charity — of anti-Semitism.

The first claimed I had “questioned the BBC’s use of a Jewish rabbi to speak on Pause for Thought”.

The second wrote: “Christopher Gray states that having a member of the Jewish faith on the BBC’s Pause for Thought is an odd choice of speaker.”

‘A Jewish rabbi’ . . . ‘a member of the Jewish faith’ . . . The whole point of what I wrote was that the BBC had not given over the slot to a single rabbi but to two rabbis, on consecutive days, and at Christmas, which is not a Jewish festival.

This is an entirely different matter, raising the question of why the BBC seemed in this instance to have abandoned its practice of giving the various religions a fair share of airtime.

That this is a practice is observably the case on Radio 4’s comparable Thought for the Day slot. Here the warm and witty contributions of Rabbi Lionel Blue (pictured) and the statelier homilies of the Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sachs take turns — to my great delight — with the thoughts of figures from a fascinating diversity of faiths.

I cannot see why my observations should supply any cause for anger, still less outrage. That they clearly have, however, is a matter for sincere regret.