JERUSALEM — Muhammad was by far the most popular name for babies born in Israel last year: 1,986 boys shared the name of the Muslim prophet, nearly twice the number of the top girls’ name, Tamar, at 1,092.

That fact alone was worthy of note, a reminder that the Arab minority in Israel is 21 percent of what the Israeli government likes to call the Jewish State (and that Muslims hew to ancient, traditional names far more than Israeli Jews — more on that later).

But even more striking was that Israel’s population authority left Muhammad off the annual Top 10 list of baby names it issued last week before Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year. Haaretz, the left-leaning Israeli daily that first reported the omission, called this in an editorial “another form of racism, which in Israel has become institutionalized and self-evident.”

Sabine Haddad, a spokeswoman for the agency that published the list, described the missing Muhammads as something between a mistake and a misunderstanding. The list, she said, was simply a response to requests “for Hebrew names” in conjunction with the start of “the Hebrew New Year.” It would have been better, she acknowledged, to put an asterisk noting that what she called “obviously Arabic names” were left off. “There was no intention, no political intention,” Ms. Haddad said in an interview. “When journalists called me and asked for the whole list, they received the whole list. It’s not that we hide that.”