Background
GORDON was born in Troyanov, Russian Empire on June 9, 1856.
GORDON was born in Troyanov, Russian Empire on June 9, 1856.
His religious parents brought him up in a rural environment, ensuring that he received both a traditional and secular education.
Gordon worked as a clerk on the farming estates of Baron Horace Giinzberg, a distant relation. He was respected for his honesty but found the job routine and not compatible with his nature. Five of his seven children died in infancy, which added to his general depression. Gordon found an outlet for his talents in his contacts with young people, whose education and welfare he helped to foster within the Jewish community.
The 1881 pogroms brought him to a Zionist outlook and he joined a branch of the Lovers of Zion movement. Gradually Gordon became attracted to the idea of working as a laborer in Eretz Israel. However, it took him many years to achieve this objective in view of his family obligations. Eventually, after the death of his parents and the financial independence of his children, he was able to take the step and at the age of forty-eight arrived in Jaffa. At first this frail and untrained intellectual could not obtain work on a farm as he so ardently desired. Gordon refused an administrative post and eventually started to work in an orange grove, followed by night labor in a wine cellar. “Labor tires the body but it gives so much to the soul,” he wrote to his wife who had remained in Russia.
The following years were difficult. Gordon had bouts of malaria, periods of unemployment, and even hunger. When his daughter arrived in 1908 she found her father almost unrecognizable with his white hair and shabby clothes. However, she was impressed by his “animated expression and shining eyes.” The following year his wife joined him and the family made their home in a sparsely furnished room in the settlement of Ein Ganim. Shortly afterward, his wife died.
In 1919 Gordon was invited to live in the communal settlement of Deganya, where he shared a room with three other pioneers. Like the settlement members, he participated in all the regular tasks. When he got word of his son’s death, he got up from his place in the dining room without a sound and went out to find solace in his work in the fields.
In his last years, his bearded figure was revered by the Jewish youth of Eretz Israel, who flocked to hear him expound his views.
Influenced by the writings of Tolstoy, Henry George, and Thoreau, Gordon stressed the concept of purity of labor as a cosmic force which should be inherent to human nature. Work redeems the individual, he argued and the same applies to nations. The Jews will not be able to lay a claim to the new land unless they redeem it with the sweat of their brow.
He championed the concept of “Jewish Labor” and claimed that part of the plight of the Jewish people in the Diaspora was in their removal from productive work. Being a socialist he opposed the exploitation of the many by the few, calling for the nationalization of the means of production and of the land. His influence was exercised because he not only preached, but also practiced the ideas which he propagated.
He shunned politics and saw himself as an educator and a guide to an entire generation of young Jews who devoted themselves to building their old-new land. Gordon was one of the first Zionist thinkers to relate fundamentally to the Arab population in Eretz Israel. “Our attitude to them must be one of humanity,” he wrote, “of moral courage which remains on the highest plane, even if the behavior of the other side is not all that is desired. Indeed their hostility is all the more reason for our humanity.”
Gordon’s high moral standards became legendary. He objected to help from Zionists abroad as charity. Serving as a guard, he carried a whistle but refused a gun. He rejected any compensation for the essays he was publishing, on the grounds that creative writing should be a by-product of manual labor. Gordon was unusual in the pioneer settlements for his Orthodox lifestyle and his putting on tefillin (phylacteries) and praying each morning.
