Jan Gotlib Bloch

Bloch had studied at the University of Berlin, worked at a Warsaw bank and then moved to Saint Petersburg, capital of the Russian Empire (which governed much of the Polish lands at the time). There, he took part in the development of the Russian Railways, both in financing the construction of new railways and in writing research papers on the subject. He founded several banking, credit and insurance companies. In 1877, he was appointed a member of the Russian Finance Ministry's Scientific Committee.

Bloch was married to Emilia Julia Kronenberg H. Koroniec (1845–1921), the granddaughter of Polish banker Samuel Eleazar Kronenberg, daughter of medical doctor Henryk Andrzej Kronenberg and niece of industrialist and Polish nationalist Leopold Stanisław Kronenberg; the Kronenberg and Bloch families had often been in competition with each other in several 19th-century Polish businesses.