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Born in Minsk in the Russian Empire (today in Belarus) to an affluent, business-owning family, Shaul Ginsburg associated with maskilic circles and the fledgling Zionist movement and contributed to the journal Ha-Magid during his student years. After receiving a law degree from the University of St. Petersburg in 1892, he turned toward journalism. By 1897, he was editing several regular columns for Voskhod, the key organ of the politically liberal and culturally Russified but Jewishly involved segment of Russian Jewry. In 1903, Ginsburg founded Der fraynd, the first Yiddish-language daily newspaper in the Russian Empire; it circulated widely and significantly influenced Yiddish journalism throughout the region. After leaving the paper in 1908, he dedicated himself to producing scholarship on Russian Jewry, most notably writing about the forced conscription of Jewish children during the nineteenth century. Ginsburg taught at the Institute for Judaic Studies in St. Petersburg after the Bolshevik Revolution, but in 1930 he emigrated to New York City, where he continued his historical research.