Hermann Minkowski was born in Aleksotas, a village in the Kovno Governorate of the Russian Empire (now incorporated into the city of Kaunas, Lithuania) to Lewin Boruch Minkowski, a merchant who subsidized the building of the choral synagogue in Kovno, and Rachel Taubmann, both of Jewish descent. Hermann was a younger brother of the medical researcher, Oskar (born 1858). In different sources Minkowski's nationality is variously given as German, Polish, or Lithuanian-German, or Russian.