Peysakh Marek

Born in Shadeve, Russian Empire (today Šeduva, Lithuania) to a melamed with maskilic inclinations, Peysakh (Pesakh) Marek received a degree in law from the University of Moscow. In 1884, after helping form the Moscow Ḥibat Tsiyon organization Bene Tsiyon, he turned to historical and ethnographical scholarship on East European Jewish life. Traveling throughout the Pale of Settlement with the sponsorship of the Society for the Promotion of Culture Among the Jews of Russia (OPE), he collected material on Jewish folk culture and local histories, particularly those related to systems of education. He published his historical work in many of the various Russian-language Jewish scholarly periodicals that emerged from the late nineteenth century on and wrote prose and poetry in Yiddish as well. He died in Saratov (present-day Russia).