Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport (1863, Vitebsk –1920, Otwock), better known by the pseudonym S. Ansky (or An-ski), was a scholar who documented Jewish folklore and mystical beliefs. He was born in Vitebsk, Belarus, then Russia, but travelled around much of the western part of the Russian Empire. Initially writing in Russian, from 1904 he also became known as a Yiddish author. His ethnological collections were locked away in Soviet vaults for years, but some material has come to light since the 1990s. The State Ethnographic Museum at St Petersburg holds a good deal of it.