There were crypto-Jews in Uruguay in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the first openly Jewish immigrants, predominantly Sephardim and Mizraḥim, arrived toward the end of the nineteenth century. In the period from 1905 to 1913, many settled in the Ciudad Vieja neighborhood of Montevideo, living in run-down conventillos (tenements). By 1918, three-quarters of the country’s Jewish population were from Islamic lands, mostly from the Ottoman Empire, but also including Egypt and and in a few isolated cases, Morocco. The majority were unskilled workers. Many worked a…