[5] Archival materials state that Iosel-Shmuila Aronovich Tsadkin was of Jewish faith and studied in the Vitebsk City Technical School between 1900 and 1904.

Archival materials contradict Zadkine himself and states that his father did not convert to the Russian Orthodox religion and his mother was not of a Scottish extraction.

Zadkine claimed in his memoir that at the age of fifteen he had been sent by his father to Sunderland in the north of England, to stay with distant Scottish relatives and learn some "good manners".

However, recent research has discovered that he ran away from home with a younger brother,and ended up living in Sunderland with the family of his paternal uncle, Joseph Zadkin, who had himself emigrated from Belarus a few years previously.

[8] He then moved to London and attended lessons at the Regent Street Polytechnic where he won a prize for modelling in 1908[9] but considered the teachers to be too conservative.

[12] He taught sculpture classes at Académie de la Grande Chaumière until 1958, students of his included artists Geula Dagan (1925–2008), Gunnar Aagaard Andersen and Genevieve Pezet.

Zadkine lived in Les Arques for a number of years, and while there, carved an enormous Christ on the Cross and Pieta that are featured in the 12th-century church which stands opposite the museum.