CARDINAL George Pell has moved to clarify demeaning remarks he made about Jews on TV, calling them intellectually lesser than the Egyptians, including Jesus Christ.

During the ABC's Q&A TV debate with atheist advocate Richard Dawkins on Monday night, he also suggested that ''no people in history were [as severely] punished as the Germans were'', apparently ignoring the Holocaust, for which the Germans were punished.

After the Executive Council of Australian Jewry conveyed its ''serious concern'', Cardinal Pell, the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, released a statement saying he was sorry the points did not come out as he preferred.

He said he was trying to ''make a point about the unique place of the Jewish people in human history as the first to receive the revelation of the one true God while I was being regularly interrupted and distracted by the chairman'' (Tony Jones).