Background
Judah Leib Gordon was born at Vilnius, Lithuania, on December 7, 1831.
Judah Leib Gordon was born at Vilnius, Lithuania, on December 7, 1831.
his education combined thorough Judaic studies and European culture and languages (Russian, German, Polish, French, and English). From 1853 he taught in government Jewish schools.
The subject of his first epic poem, "Ahavat David u Mikhai" (1857) was the love between David and Michal, daughter of Saul. This and subsequent works of Gordon’s romantic period, with their biblical themes and diction, were infused with the spirit of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah).
Drawing on vast stores of Talmudic knowledge, Gordon’s chosen mission throughout his poetic works, was to call attention to the misery of Jewish life in Russia of his day. The cycle of poems "Korol Yameinu" (History of our times), describes with pathos and realism the plight of women and other groups victimized by archaic rabbinic law and demands religious reforms from within traditional Judaism.
In 1872 Gordon was called to Saint Petersburg to take the office of secretary of the Jewish community and of the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews. During this period he continued writing and editing prolifically.
Denounced to the government as a nihilist in 1879, he and his wife were banished to Petrozavodsk, in northern Russia. After one hundred days of exile, the charges of anti-tsarist activity were proven false and Gordon returned to Saint Petersburg. But the indifference of the Jewish community to his fate and its passivity during his arrest cast Gordon into despair. As the younger generation of Jewish "enlightened” became increasingly assimilated, abandoning Jewish values along with the Hebrew language, he realized the impossibility of his former conviction that one could be “a Jew at home and a man in the street.” The undercurrent of his despair is audible in his poem “Lemi ani ame"(For whom do I labor?).
All dreams of Russian emancipation were crushed with the pogroms of 1881. The two great advocates of the new Zionist movement, Perez Smolenskin and M. L. Lilienblum, mandated extreme rejection of European culture and national rebirth in Israel. In opposition, Gordon believed that “our redemption can come about only after our spiritual deliverance,” and favored emigration to western countries, particularly the United States.