GORDON, DAVID

GORDON, DAVID (1831–1886), Hebrew journalist and editor; one of the early supporters of Ḥibbat Zion. Born in Podmerecz near Vilna, he studied in a yeshivah and later turned to Haskalah and took up secular studies. In 1849 he settled in Sergei (Serbei), earning a meager livelihood as a teacher. In the mid-1850s he moved to England, where he remained until 1858, teaching Hebrew and German. In 1858 Gordon moved to Lyck when Eliezer Lipmann Silbermann invited him to become assistant editor of the first Hebrew weekly, Ha-Maggid. In 1880 he officially became the editor of Ha-Maggid, a position he had long occupied unofficially. From 1879 to 1881 he published a weekly literary and scientific supplement to Ha-Maggid, called Maggid Mishneh. He also edited a German paper, Lycker Anzeiger, and wrote for the Times and Jewish Chronicle. His articles in Ha-Maggid calling for Jewish national revival in Palestine were the first of their kind in Hebrew. When the Ḥibbat Zion movement was established in the early 1880s, he became one of its leading members and under his editorship Ha-Maggid became the Hebrew voice of the movement. Gordon also published several books and contributed to various Hebrew and Yiddish journals. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Waxman, Literature, 3 (1960), 335–7; G. Kressel (ed.), Mivḥar Kitvei Gordon (1942), with introd. and bibl. (Getzel Kressel)