Born in Zamość, in Lublin Governorate, Congress Poland, a city known as an important center of the Haskalah, or Jewish enlightenment, Peretz was raised there in an Orthodox Jewish home. His father, Yude, was a merchant, and his mother, Rivke, also helped to run the family's shop; Peretz was the oldest of three siblings who survived to adulthood. Mostly taught by private tutors, he received a traditional Jewish education in Hebrew and rabbinic texts, and for a short time, at around the age of 13, studied at yeshivot in Zamość and the nearby town of Szczebrzeszyn. He also had tutors for Russian, Polish, and German. Upon gaining access to a private library, he avidly read secular books in Polish, Russian, and German, as well as French, which he had learned on his own. At one point he hoped to study either at a secular gymnasium, or at the theologically liberal rabbinical school at Zhytomyr, but his mother opposed such plans. When he was around 18 years old, his parents arranged his marriage to Sarah, the daughter of the Hebrew author Gabriel Judah Lichtenfeld, whom Liptzin describes as a "minor poet and philosopher".