Vichy's anti-Jewish policies influenced the lives of 300,000 Jews in French colonial North Africa. European immigrants there harbored strong antisemitic sentiments, and the fanatically racist Algerian nationalist movement vigorously terrorized Jews.

The mayor of Algiers, Max Régis, who was also president of the Anti-Jewish League, vowed early in his career to "water Algeria's liberty tree with Jewish blood." Algerian officials stripped Jews of French citizenship, ordered Yellow Star armbands, and applied quotas to education--even primary schools.

In Morocco, where Jewish subjects were granted equal rights, Vichy's "Jewish Statute" was not officially in effect. Still, the French colonial administration vigorously imposed anti-Jewish laws, purging the civil service and barring Jewish children from public swimming pools and scouting organizations. In Tunisia, Jews' independent status ended with the application of the "Statute." Jews lost jobs, and quotas restricted education. Libya's Jews suffered harassment by Italian colonial officials who marked passports, seized property, limited cultural opportunities, and interned Jews in labor camps, where many died.

No roundups of North African Jews occurred, but over 13,000 foreign Jews deported from Vichy were interned in the desert, where they constituted slave-labor battalions for the Trans-Saharan Railway project. Many died in these remote and desolate camps.