The Russian Zionist Aaron David Gordon (1856-1922) was the spiritual leader of the Palestinian Jewish labor movement. He taught that work is the basis of human civilization.

Aaron Gordon was born in the village of Troyano, Podolia (region in present-day Ukraine). Because of Gordon's poor health, he was taught the traditional Jewish subjects by a private tutor. Later he studied at the towns of Golovnievsk and Obodovka, where he lived at the house of his relatives and met his cousin and future wife, Feigel Tartakov. For a year he studied in Vilna, after which he went back to his parents. Again Gordon had a private teacher for Jewish studies, but at the same time he devoted himself to the study of modern languages (Russian, German, French, and Hebrew), which gave him the equivalent of a high school education.

After Gordon was rejected because of his health by the...