Summary. We provide scans of census reports from the Mandate of Palestine and later censuses of the West Bank and Jordan.
During the period 1918–1948, Palestine was under control of the British government, from 1923 under a Mandate granted by the League of Nations. During that time two formal censuses were conducted. The census reports were published, but are rather rare so we provide scans of most of them here for the first time.
The 1922 census report consisted of a single 58-page document. Parts of northern Palestine were not included since they were still under French control.
The 1931 census was a more scientific operation. There were three volumes published.
After 1931 there were plans for another census but they never came to fruition. The only official village-level population and land ownership data available from this period comes from a few local surveys.
We begin with the 1938 Village Statistics, from the National Library of Israel. PDF
Much better known is the 1945 Village Statistics. Despite it being cited very often, until recently the only online access was at the National Library of Israel. However, for some reason NLI has withdrawn their copy from web view, so we present it here. PDF
Here are the columns for population, one image per sub-district, which the document says are for April 1, 1945.
The only explanatory information in the document is Page 2.
A version of the 1945 Village Statistics was published in 1970 by the Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center, but unfortunately they collapsed some columns together. In particular, they combined the counts of Christians and Muslims for ideological reasons. It can be viewed here and is useful for the extended introduction by someone who was involved in compiling it.
Here we provide extracts from the 1961 Census of Jordan. The census included the West Bank (census districts Hebron, Jerusalem and Nablus together with the contributions of those regions to the "Scattered Tents census district"). The quality (from microfilm) is too poor for reliable OCR. Note that the tables on each page run from right to left.
Table 1.7 lists the localities with a population of 2,000 or more and their populations by sex. Table 1.8 lists the total populations of localities with from 100 to 1,999 persons. PDF.
The Israeli government conducted a census of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, soon after those places were occupied by Israel in the Six-day War. Extensive tables from the census were compiled into electronic form by Joel Perlmann of the Levy Economic Institute of Bard College. Please visit here.
