Considerable research has documented how, between 1940 and 1944 the Jews of metropolitan France faced unprecedented and ultimately lethal anti-Semitic persecution. Under Vichy and the Nazis, Jews were defined by the racial logic of both regimes, and thus became “non-Aryans” or “undesirables.” Far less research, however, has examined France’s Muslims or Jewish-Muslim relations in France at this time. This paper discusses one key facet of that story. Muslims in Occupied France enjoyed rather ambiguous racial status. Despite their unequal position as colonized and “non-European,” their racial position during the war was akin to that of “Aryans,” and they were regarded as unequivocally superior racially to Jews. Thus, as France’s approximately 35,000 Jews from North Africa and the Middle East sought to evade persecution, a significant number tried to “pass” as Muslim. They did so in a myriad of ways that included resorting to Arabic speech when stopped by a Nazi officer; submitting paperwork falsely detailing their Muslim heritage; and memorizing passages from the Qu’ran in preparation for “racial examinations.” The logic of such disguises derived from these Jews’ frequent similarities to Muslims -- in linguistic and cultural knowledge, attire, cuisine, and even physical characteristics such as skin color, or for men, circumcision. This paper traces and analyzes these Jews’ efforts to pass as Muslim. Such efforts – and the mixed response they elicited from Muslims – illuminate several little-known components of the period’s history. First, we can see how Jews from the Maghreb and the Mashriq drew upon their longstanding commonalities and coexistence with Muslims as a survival strategy. They did so in a manner that at once utilized specific knowledge of Muslim religious practices, and followed centuries of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish tradition regarding the permissibility of dissimulation in the face of danger. The story reflects as well a wider, more modern phenomenon: since the late nineteenth century, in the context of shifting imperial boundaries and legal regimes, thousands of Jews across Eurasia and the Middle East had repeatedly reinvented themselves, sometimes in the form of self-Orientalization. Perhaps most importantly, these Jews made a choice of disguise that at once mimicked and sought to adapt to the larger racial logic of Vichy and the Nazis, instrumentalizing Islam as a form of ethnicity that might enable them to navigate the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust.