Judah Leib Gordon

Who was Judah Leib Gordon?

Judah Leib Gordon, also known as Leon Gordon, was among the most important Hebrew poets of the Jewish Enlightenment.

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 on 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 Enlightenment figures of the time, including Kalman Shulman, the poet Abraham Dob Bär Lebensohn and his son Micah Joseph Lebensohn.