 Marc Chagall was born Moishe Shagall in a Lithuanian Jewish Hassidic family in Liozna, near the city of Vitebsk (Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire) in 1887.At the time of his birth, Vitebsk's population was about 66,000, with half the population being Jewish.A picturesque city of churches and synagogues, it was called "Russian Toledo", after a cosmopolitan city of the former Spanish Empire.