Aaron David Gordon

Born in a village in the Podolia region of the Russian Empire (today in Ukraine) to parents who managed an estate belonging to the great Russian Jewish magnate Baron Evzel’ Gintsburg, Aaron David Gordon completed a traditional religious education and then worked as an administrator for another Gintsburg property for more than two decades. During this period, he became active in the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement. In 1903, at age forty-seven, he took his family to Palestine and, despite his age, threw himself into farm labor together with a small cohort of much younger Second Aliyah immigrants who were imbued with a mix of socialist and nationalist ideals. He soon emerged as a charismatic visionary of how and why a Jewish return to manual labor in general and agricultural labor in Palestine and the Land of Israel particularly was the most essential dimension of Zionism. Positing that a Jewish return to agriculture was essential to Jewish moral regeneration from the ostensible psychic wounds of commerce, urban life, and exile, his unsystematic writings also framed Jewish reconnection with the land and the Land as some sort of metaphysical restoration. He cast his ideas about Jewish (and human) reconnection to labor and nature in cosmic and spiritual terms redolent of both kabbalistic and Tolstoyan motifs, and was seen by his contemporaries as articulating a “religion of labor.” Working with considerably more secular contemporaries who shared his emphasis on agrarian labor and voluntaristic socialism as the most essential dimension of Zionism both morally and practically, Gordon helped found the Ha-Po‘el ha-Tsair (Young Laborer) party in 1905.