The French resistance movement battling the pro-German Vichy regime and its ally, Nazi Germany, was a source of hope to persecuted Jews in France. The resistance condemned Vichy’s antisemitic edicts and Germany’s genocidal policy toward Jews, yet the whiff of antisemitism persisted in its ranks.

This, in essence, is the overarching theme of Renee Poznanski’s massive work, Propaganda and Persecution: The French Resistance and the Jewish Question, published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

Poznanski, a specialist in wartime France and a professor emeritus at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, delves into this topic in voluminous detail in her dense and ambitious book. Although the attitude of the French resistance toward Jews is at the very core of it, she wisely devotes considerable space to the related issue of antisemitism in the first third of 20th century France. A long and ignoble history of hatred toward Jews, of course, laid the foundation of Vichy’s relentless assault against the Jewish community.

When France was conquered and occupied by Germany in 1940, French Jews accounted for only 0.7 percent of its population. Yet the 330,000 Jews of France loomed large in the eyes of antisemites. France was the first Western nation to emancipate Jews, yet its Jewish citizens faced unremitting hostility from antisemites.

“French antisemitism drew on a concept of nationality linked to a person’s community of origin, in which Catholicism was the essence of the French nation, and not on a notion of citizenship in its republican version,” Poznanski writes in a........

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