CRIF, the representative body of French Jews, has denounced a comparison made by a presidential candidate, Vincent Peillon, between the Nazi persecution of Jews and the present situation of Muslims in France.

Peillon, who is running in the Socialist Party primaries ahead of the May presidential election, made the comparison in an interview with France 2 television channel.

A former minister and a member of the European Parliament who has Jewish origins, he was commenting on a question about France’s strict separation between state and religion, known in France as “laicite” (secularity).

“If some want to use laicite, as has been done in the past, against certain populations … Forty years ago it was the Jews who put on yellow stars. Today, some of our Muslim countrymen are often portrayed as radical Islamists. It is intolerable.”

In a statement, CRIF, accused Peillon of making “statements that only serve those trying to rewrite history.”

In a statement Wednesday, CRIF, the umbrella group of French Jewish communities, accused Peillon of making “statements that only serve those trying to rewrite history,’’ as the group demanded ‘’a clarification and immediate correction’’ on his part.

‘’The history concerning the deportation of more than 75,000 Jews from France to concentration camps and death and the looting of their property as well as discriminatory laws such as the one about wearing yellow stars, should not be instrumentalized to create a false equivalence of suffering,” it said.

Peillon neither retracted his remark nor apologized in a statement published Wednesday on his website, but said he would wanted to elaborate on what he meant in light of the controversy it provoked and to “refine my view, which may have been misrepresented because of brevity.”

He wrote that he “clearly did not want to say that laicite was the origin of anti-Semitism of Vichy France,” which was the part of the country run by a pro-Nazi collaborationist government. He also wrote that “what the Jews experienced under Vichy should not be banalized in any way” and that he was committed to fighting racism and anti-Semitism.

“I wanted to denounce the strategy of the far right, which always used the words of the French Republic or social issues to turn them against the population. It is doing so today with laicite against the Muslims,” Peillon wrote.