Miriam Markel-Mosessohn (née Wierzbolowska; 1839–1920) was a Russian author and translator who wrote in Hebrew. Biography Markel-Mosessohn was born in Volkovyshki, in the Russian Empire (today, Vilkaviškis, Lithuania), the daughter of a wealthy Jewish merchant, Shimon Wierzbolowki, and his wife Ḥayyah. She had two brothers, Yosef and Shmuel, and a sister, Devorah; both the daughters and the sons of the family attended the local Jewish school, where they learned to read and write Hebrew; although she did not attend cheder – the traditional elementary school where young boys studied the chumash (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) – her father hired a private tutor so that she could pursue her desire to study scripture. In 1851, at the age of 12, she moved with her family to Suvalk (today, Suwałki, Poland), in the part of the empire known as Congress Poland, where she continued her Hebrew studies under the Hebraist Judah Loeb Paradiesthal. During her two and a half years of study under Paradiesthal he also instructed her in German and, to a lesser extent, French languages and literatures. When he left to take a position as a tutor in Warsaw, Markel-Mosessohn continued her Hebrew studies independently, shifting her focus from formal study of the language to intensive reading of whatever Hebrew works she could obtain; in this way she absorbed the products of the Jewish cultural revival then under way. During the 1860s she began focusing her efforts on translation of works into Hebrew, and completed a Hebrew version of Ludwig Philippson's German-language historical novella Der Flüchtling aus Jerusalem (in manuscript). She married Anshel Markel-Mosessohn (1844–1903), of Kovno (Kaunas, Lithuania), in 1863, when she was 24 and he 19. She and her husband corresponded in Hebrew and shared an interest in the Hebrew revival; he was supportive of her writing, as well as of her efforts to publish her work. She assisted him in his business dealings at points. The two remained married for forty years, until Anshel Markel-Mosessohn's death, in 1903; they never had children. In 1869 she published the first volume of Ha-Yehudim be-Angliya, her elegant Hebrew translation of 's Die Juden und die Kreuzfahrer unter Richard Löwenherz, a historical work about the Jews in England in the era of the crusades, under Richard I ('the Lionheart'). The second volume was not published until 1895 (both volumes appeared in Warsaw). Poor health and financial problems