GORDIN, JACOB

GORDIN, JACOB (1896–1947), religious philosopher. Gordin was born in Dvinsk, Latvia, and received his general and Jewish education in St. Petersburg. During the Russian Revolution and civil war, he wandered from one village to the next and took the opportunity to increase the depth of his knowledge of Jewish mysticism by becoming acquainted with Ukranian Jewish kabbalists. In 1923 he settled in Germany where he became part of the Akademie der Wissenschaft des Judenstums. It was in Berlin that he published his major work on general philosophy, Untersuchungen zur Theorie des unendlichen Urteils. During the same period he published several important entries on Jewish Philosophy for the Encyclopedia Judaica of Berlin, including those on Crescas, J. Kaspi, Kant, Hermann Cohen, and God in Jewish Religious Philosophy, which was republished later in the Encyclopaedia Hebraica. Gordin immigrated to France in 1933 after the advent of the Nazis and became librarian of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. His significant articles on Spinoza, Maimonides, and others were then published in French in the Cahiers Juifs of Alexandria. After the Nazi occupation of France, the Eclaireurs Israélites (Jewish Scouting Movement) of France opened educational training centers for its leaders and children's homes in the Vichy "free zone." They called upon Gordin to organize the Jewish training of their educators and he thereby reaffirmed the Jewish consciousness of a significant number of members of the Jewish Resistance. It is from this time that he began to influence leon poliakov . He returned to Paris after the Liberation of France and for three years – until his death at age 50 – played an increasingly important role in Jewish education at the highest level of the young intellectuals who were searching for their roots after the terrible years of the war. Gordin gave up writing in order to dedicate himself entirely to oral instruction, as master to disciple following an ancient Jewish tradition. Among his best-known disciples were Robert Gamzon (Castor), Léon Ashkenazi (Manitou), and Renée Neher-Bernheim. He introduced them to a knowledge of Jewish mysticism in its most exalted philosophical aspects. After he became seriously ill, his students came to his home to study, fascinated by the extent of his knowledge and the depth of his thinking. Long after his death his disciples have continued to disseminate the teachings of their master in France and in Israel. (Leon Poliakov / Renee Neher-Bernheim) GORDIS, ROBERT GORDIS, ROBERT (1908–1992), U.S. Bible scholar, author, and rabbi. Gordis was born in New York City. He wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on Masoretic qere and ketib at Dropsie College, where his primary teacher was the renowned textual critic max margolis . With prospects of academic employment curtailed by the Great Depression, Gordis decided to become a Conservative rabbi and was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1932. He served as rabbi of Temple Beth El of Rockaway Park, N.Y., from 1931 until his retirement in 1968, and while there established the first Conservative day school in the United States. Gordis did not abandon academic life. Invited in 1937 as an annual lecturer to the Seminary, Gordis served as professor of Bible beginning in 1940. Gordis also taught at Columbia University (1948–57), the (Protestant) Union Theological Seminary (1960), and Temple University. He served as editor of the periodical Judaism, president of the Rabbinical Assembly and of the Synagogue Council of America, and consultant to the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Gordis' biblical scholarship has been in three major areas: Wisdom literature with special emphasis on the Books of Ecclesiastes and Job, to both of which he composed book-length commentaries; the forms of rhetoric and biblical poetry; and aspects of the masorah and the preservation of the biblical text. Gordis employed his considerable knowledge of rabbinic literature as a tool in biblical lexicography. Within the Conservative movement he was a spokesman for the centrist position, advocating change within the framework of the law. He also wrote on the relationship of Judaism to contemporary problems, on the pertinent insights of the Jewish tradition to the issues facing Western civilization, and on the status of Judaism in the modern age. Among his books are Koheleth: the Man and His World (1951), Judaism for the Modern Age (1955), Faith for Moderns (1960) Root and the Branch (1962), Book of God and Man: A Study of Job (1965), and Judaism in a Christian World (1966). -ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: S.D. Sperling, in: DBI, 1;456. (Jack Reimer / S. David Sperling (2nd ed.)