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Judah Leib (Ben Asher) Gordon, also known as Leon Gordon, (December 7, 1830, Vilnius, Lithuania – September 16, 1892, St. Petersburg, Russia) (
Hebrew: יהודה לייב גורדון) was among the most important
Hebrew poets of the
Jewish Enlightenment
The ''Haskalah'', often termed Jewish Enlightenment ( he, השכלה; literally, "wisdom", "erudition" or "education"), was an intellectual movement among the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, with a certain influence on those in Western Euro ...
.
Biography
Gordon was born to well-to-do Jewish parents who owned a hotel in
Vilnius. As a privileged child, he was able to study ''
Torah'' with some of the great educators of the city, and soon proved to be an exceptional student. He had already mastered the entire
Bible by the age of eleven, and was fluent in hundreds of pages of ''
Talmud.'' Matters took a sharp turn when Gordon was fourteen, and his father went
bankrupt. Unable to finance his son's education any longer, the younger Gordon began a course of independent study at one of the many study halls in the city. In just three years, he had mastered almost the entire Talmud and dozens of other religious texts. By that time, however, he was also drawn by the spirit of the Enlightenment that was sweeping across the city. He began reading secular
literature and learning foreign languages, and he befriended some of the leading
Haskalah figures of the time, including
Kalman Schulman
Kalman Schulman (1819 – January 2, 1899) was a Jewish writer who pioneered modern Hebrew literature.
Life
Schulman was born in 1819 in Bykhaw, Mogilev Governorate, Russia. He came from a Hassidic family.
Schulman studied Hebrew and the Talmu ...
, the poet
Abraham Dob Bär Lebensohn
Abraham Dov Ber Lebensohn (; – November 19, 1878), also known by the pen names Abraham Dov-Ber Michailishker () and Adam ha-Kohen (), was a Lithuanian Jewish Hebraist, poet and educator.
Biography
Avraham Dov Ber Lebenson was born in Vilna, ...
and his son
Micah Joseph Lebensohn.
With the financial situation deteriorating at home, Gordon, then twenty-two, decided it was time for him to pursue a career. He received a teaching certificate from the local rabbinical college, and became a school teacher in some of the smaller towns that housed major ''
yeshivas'', including
Ponivezh and
Telz. During the twenty years he spent as a teacher, he produced his most important work as a poet and author.
In late 1871 Gordon was invited by the
Jewish community of
Saint Petersburg to serve as secretary of both the community and the
Society for the Spread of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia; after several months of negotiations, he accepted the dual position for a three-month trial period, beginning in June 1872. Welcoming the move to the cosmopolitan Russian capital, and finding his activities on behalf of the community and the society well suited to his aspirations to contribute to the modernization of Jewish life, he quickly made himself indispensable in his post, and the community offered him a permanent contract, which he accepted. He continued in this position continuously for nearly seven years.
In May 1879 he was arrested for purported anti-czarist activities, and exiled for some months to
Pudozh, in the Olonets district, before finally being cleared of the charges in 1880; it was a blow to him that the Saint Petersburg community chose not to reinstate him in his post upon his return.
That same year Gordon became an editor for the Hebrew newspaper ''
Ha-Melitz''; and, despite frequent conflict with the newspaper's founder and editor-in-chief,
Aleksander Zederbaum
Aleksander Ossypovich Zederbaum (; August 27, 1816, Zamość – September 8, 1893, Saint Petersburg) was a Polish-Russian Jewish journalist who wrote primarily in Hebrew. He was founder and editor of ''Ha-Melitz'', and other periodicals published ...
, he continued in that capacity until 1888.
Literary work
Gordon took a leading part in the modern revival of the Hebrew language and culture. His
satires did much to rouse the Russian Jews to a new sense of the reality of life, and Gordon was the apostle of enlightenment in the
ghettos. Much of his poetry revolves around biblical and historical themes. These include ''The Love of David and Michal'' (1857), ''King Zedekiah in Prison'' (1879), ''Judah's Parables'' (1859), ''David and Barzilai'', ''Osenath, Daughter of Potiphera'', ''From between the Lion's Teeth'', and ''From the Depths of the Sea''.
His works were intended to disseminate Enlightenment values and had a profound impact on Jewish life. Gordon also published collections of fables, most of them translated. In works such as "Little Fables for Big Children", he continues to advocate for the adoption of Enlightenment values, as he does in his memoirs, published in the last year of his life.
Among his other writing on social issues is "The Point on Top of the
Yodh" (''Kotzo shel yud''), dealing with the rights of women. The poem, which he dedicated to his friend the Hebraist
Miriam Markel-Mosessohn,
[Balin, Carole B. (March 1, 2009)]
Miriam Markel-Mosessohn
" ''Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia''. Jewish Women's Archive. www.jwa.org. Retrieved 2016-08-25. describes a narrow-minded rabbi who destroys a woman's chance for happiness by invalidating her
''get'' (divorce document) – due to a trifling spelling mistake (the poem's Hebrew title essentially refers to "crossing the t's and dotting the i's").
His poems were collected in four volumes, ''Kol Shire Yehudah'' (St. Petersburg, 1883–1884); his novels in ''Kol Kitbe Yehuda'' (''Collected Writings of Gordon'',
Odessa
Odesa (also spelled Odessa) is the third most populous city and municipality in Ukraine and a major seaport and transport hub located in the south-west of the country, on the northwestern shore of the Black Sea. The city is also the administrativ ...
, 1889).
References
Further reading
*
*
* Stanislawski, Michael (1988). ''"For Whom Do I Toil?": Judah Leib Gordon and the Crisis of Russian Jewry''. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ziva Shamir "O Hebrew Woman, who knows your life: A Poetical Footnote to History"' . Ariel - a quarterly review of arts an letters in Israel, no.49, 1979
External links
''Jewish Encyclopedia'': "Gordon, Leon (Judah Löb ben Asher)"by Herman Rosenthal, Baron David von Günzburg, and Max Seligsohn (1906).
Biographical article from ''Junior Judaica: Encyclopaedia Judaica for Youth'' Jewish Agency for Israel. www.jewishagency.org
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gordon, Judah Leib
Modern Hebrew writers
Hebrew-language poets
Jewish poets
Lithuanian Jews
Hebrew-language writers
1830 births
1892 deaths
19th-century poets
People of the Haskalah