Lord George Gordon
In 1759 he had been bought an ensign's commission in the army's 89th (Highland) Regiment of Foot, then commanded by his stepfather Staats Long Morris, but after completing his education at Eton, he entered the Royal Navy in 1763 at the age of 12.
His behaviour in raising the poor living conditions of his sailors led to his being mistrusted by his fellow officers, although it contributed to his popularity amongst ordinary seamen.
Lord Sandwich, then at the head of the Admiralty, refused to promise him immediate command of a ship, and he resigned his commission in 1777, without having served during the American War of Independence, which he politically opposed.
He was just as likely to attack the radical opposition spokesman Charles James Fox in a speech as he was to challenge Lord North, the Tory Prime Minister.
[2] In 1779 he organised, and made himself head of, the Protestant Association, formed to secure the repeal of the Papists Act 1778, which had restored limited civil rights to Roman Catholics willing to swear certain oaths of loyalty to the Crown.
On 2 June 1780 he headed a crowd of around 50,000 people that marched in procession from St George's Fields just south of London to the Houses of Parliament in order to present a huge petition against (partial) Catholic emancipation.
In 1786 he was excommunicated by the Archbishop of Canterbury for refusing to bear witness in an ecclesiastical suit, and in 1787 he was convicted of defaming Marie Antoinette, Jean-Balthazar d'Adhémar (the French ambassador to Great Britain) and the administration of justice in England.
On account of representations from the court of Versailles he was commanded to leave that country, and, returning to England, was apprehended in Birmingham,[6] and in January 1788 was sentenced to five years' imprisonment in Newgate and some harsh additional conditions.
[7] In 1787, at the age of 36, Lord George Gordon converted to Judaism in Birmingham (though other sources report the conversion occurred slightly earlier when in Holland in the Netherlands),[dubious – discuss] and underwent brit milah (ritual circumcision; circumcision was rare in the England of his day) at the synagogue in Severn Street now next door to Singers Hill Synagogue.
Not much is known about his life as a Jew in Birmingham, but the Bristol Journal of 15 December 1787 reported that Gordon had been living in Birmingham since August 1786: Unknown to every class of man but those of the Jewish religion, among whom he has passed his time in the greatest cordiality and friendship... he appears with a beard of extraordinary length, and the usual raiment of a Jew... his observance of the culinary (kashrut) laws preparation is remarkable.He lived with a Jewish woman in the Froggery, a marshy area now under New Street station.
Christopher Hibbert, another biographer, writes that scores of prisoners waited outside the door to his cell for news about his health; friends, regardless of the risk of infection, stood whispering in the room and praying for his recovery – but George "Yisrael bar Avraham" Gordon died on 1 November 1793 (26 Mar-Cheshvan 5554) at the age of 41.
