To our English-speaking ears, it seems that Gordon would be Scottish, as it is indeed a common family name—as well as given name—among Scots and Brits.
Yet Gordon is also a bona-fide Ashkenazi family name (spelled גארדאן or גורדון), particularly widespread among Jews of Lithuanian descent (“Litvaks” in Yiddish). This explains why there are so many Gordons among South African Jews, who migrated primarily from Lithuania.
So what does it mean? In its Jewish iteration, Gordon implies that its bearers are from Grodno, a once-flourishing center of Jewish life, also known as Hrodno, today in western Belarus.
During the 16th century, Grodno was famous for its rabbi, Rabbi Mordechai Jaffe,1 known as the Levush, who founded a yeshivah, and held the position of rabbi and rosh yeshivah for about 16 years (1572-1588), at which point he was invited to become the rabbi of Lublin, Poland.
Largely spared the devastation of the Khmelnytskyi uprising in the mid 17th century, the Jewish community of Grodno flourished for centuries.
At the cusp of the Holocaust, the city had 25,000 Jewish citizens, roughly half its total population. Most did not survive the Nazi carnage, and years of Communist persecution in subsequent decades continued to erode the few remaining embers of Jewish life.
Yet following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Jews of Grodno reorganized and miraculously revived their community. Today, under the guidance of Chabad emissaries, Rabbi Yitzchok and Rebbetzin Nechama Kofman, the Grodno Great Synagogue is once again a bustling center of Jewish life.
It should be noted that not all Jewish Gordons derive their name from the city of Grodno. In some instances, it is an “Americanization” of names such as Grodzinski and others.
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