Actor-Shared Background: Like Jacob, actor Marcel Dalio was Jewish and emigrated to the USA for a time before returning to France much later. He left France in 1939 right at the outbreak of World War II when he learned that Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and appeared in the likes of Casablanca and To Have And Have Not, before returning to France after the war.
The scene in the street named Rue des Rosiers in Paris (with the Hasidic dance most notably) was actually filmed on studio lots in Aubervilliers, 15 kilometers North of the actual street.
Most of the Orly airport scenes were filmed on studio lots in Boulogne-Billancourt.
Italian actor Renzo Montagnani as a State Sec agent from said fictional Arab country, plus his men, who are all played by French actors (one of them, Gérard Darmon, is of Algerian Sephardi Jewish descent).
American actress Janet Brandt as the French Tzippé "Mamé" Schmoll.
On-Set Injury: Stuntman Rémy Julienne was injured when the car with the boat on top flips into a river, and he nearly drowned.
Production Posse: The last film De Funès made under the direction of Gérard Oury after The Sucker, La Grande Vadrouille and Delusions of Grandeur (they intended to make more films like the never-completed Le Crocodile, but de Funès' myocardial infarctions in 1974 put an end to it all). Save for The Sucker, Danièle Thompson (Oury's daughter) co-wrote all of them.
The story was originally to be about the adventures of Rabbi Jacob himself and not someone impersonating him. Oury would later reuse the idea as the basis of Lévy and Goliath.
Gérard Oury and Danièle Thompson first thought to have the bulk of the story set in Israel. They spent a week there, didn't get much ideas from the place and eventually decided to set the film firmly in France.
Oury first wanted the likes of Michel Polnareff and Georges Delerue for the soundtrack before Vladimir Cosma was chosen.
Other Trivia
The film was linked to a tragic hostage crisis. It came out at the time of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Danielle Cravenne, the psychologically unstable wife of the film's publicist Georges Cravenne, took a .22 Long Rifle carbine and a mock-up handgun and hijacked the Paris-Nice flight (Boeing 727-228) on October 18, 1973, the very day of the film's release. Among her demands, she asked for the film to be pulled out of theaters, believing it to be "pro-Zionist propaganda" (a claim that didn't have any basis, since the modern state of Israel is never brought up in the film, and the film's Jewish director Gérard Oury deliberately included a Jewish-Arab friendship in it). The GIPN managed to free the hostages after the plane landed at the Marignane airport near Marseille, at the cost of shooting Mrs. Cravenne dead (she opened fire first).
