ishment of Israel in 1948, Palestine already had a significant Jewish population. The main contributing factor was increased immigration of Jews from Europe, North Africa and the Middle East during the later part of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. At the end of World War I, approximately 55,000 Jews were living in "the Promised Land." The 1922 Census showed that there were 83,790 Jews living in Palestine, approximately 11 percent of the total population. Ten years later in 1932, this number had grown to 192,137, 17.9 percent of the total population. From 1930-1938 a total of 222,648 Jews immigrated to Palestine, and in 1938, the total Palestinian Jewish population had reached 411,222. The first wave of eastern Europeans began to immigrate to Palestine in the 1880s, but before that time, the majority of the Jewish community was Sephardim, although their mass migration came after World War I.
             Following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, Palestine became a mandated territory of the British by the League of
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