About Jan Gotlib Bloch
Jan Gotlib "Bogumił" Bloch (Russian: Иван Станиславович Блиох or Блох; 24 July 1836 – 7 January 1902) was a Polish banker and railway financier who devoted his private life to the study of modern industrial warfare. Born Jewish and a convert to Calvinism, he went to considerable lengths to oppose the prevalent antisemitic policies of the Tsarist government in Congress Poland, and was sympathetic to the fledgling Zionist movement. 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. Bloch attended the first Hague Peace Conference in 1899, possibly at the invitation of Tsar Nicholas II, and distributed copies of his work to delegates from the diplomatic missions of 26 states, to little avail. Since 1897, Bloch became involved with Zionist activities in Russia, and became friendly with Theodor Herzl.
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