LONDON — French officials paid their respects Friday at a Jewish cemetery near Strasbourg, where 37 tombstones and a monument to Holocaust victims had been defaced with swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti in the same week that a deadly attack that shook the nation. 

“When a place of recollection is desecrated, it’s the entire Republic that is sullied,” Christophe Castaner, France’s interior minister, wrote on Twitter after visiting the cemetery in Herrlisheim. “ Everything is being done to identify and detain the authors of this desecration.” 

The authorities have not said if they have any suspects in the vandalism, which took place Monday night or Tuesday morning in Herrlisheim, a town of fewer than 5,000 people a few miles from Strasbourg, in the northeast corner of France. 

The incident came at a tense time for the nation, shaken by what the authorities called a terrorist attack at a Christmas market in Strasbourg on Tuesday, the “Yellow Vest” protests of recent weekends and a rise in anti-Semitic acts.