Chaim Zhitlowsky was a celebrated Yiddishist philosopher and political radical. He was a founder and theoretician of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in Russia, but was attracted back into Jewish life and Jewish communal activism by the pogroms. Here is his famous essay translated from Yiddish into English, in which he compares and contrast Job, a righteous man who cannot understand why God is punishing him, with Faust, a man who has sold his soul to the Devil and can indulge in any evil here on Earth with the understanding that he will spend the Eternity in Hell once his life on Earth ends.