This article investigates how the categories of ‘race’ and ‘religion’ are concurrently produced in international arenas. The 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination serves as a case in point. While initial discussions focused on a joint condemnation of racial and religious discrimination, debates at the UN during the 1960s led to separate the two issues in the final draft. Relying on archives and interviews with current experts of the CERD (Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination), I show that the committee inherited the race-religion disconnection manufactured in the 1960s with ambivalence, but pragmatically adapted its practice to adjudicate on forms of hostility (anti-Semitism, Islamophobia) where race and religion are de facto closely intertwined. I examine how CERD experts used various instruments of interpretation and benefited from the wider ‘turn to intersectionality’ to carve out a space for the race-religion intersection within their mandate.