Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann

First published:Joseph und seine Bruder, 1933-1943 (English translation, 1934-1944, 1948): Die Geschichten Jaakobs, 1933 (Joseph and His Brothers, 1934; also as The Tales of Jacob, 1934); Der junge Joseph, 1934 (The Young Joseph, 1935); Joseph in Agypten, 1936 (Joseph in Egypt, 1938); Joseph, der Ernahrer, 1943 (Joseph the Provider, 1944)

Type of work: Comic epic

Time of work: c.1400 b.c.e.

Locale: Canaan and Egypt

Principal Characters:

• Jacob, the blessed son of Isaac
• Rachel, Jacob’s favorite wife
• Joseph, their beloved son
• Mut, Potiphar’s wife, who tries to seduce Joseph
• Ikhnaton, the Pharaoh of Egypt

The Novels

In his four Joseph novels, Thomas Mann explores the roots of Western civilization by elaborating on the stories of Abraham’s descendants, which are recorded in the last half of the book of Genesis. The first novel in the tetralogy, Joseph and His Brothers, explains how Joseph’s ancestors developed and bequeathed to him a profound desire to serve only the Highest, the One, the Living God. In obedience to his God, Abraham had nearly sacrificed his son Isaac before God told him to put a ram on the altar instead. When Isaac, old and almost blind, bestows the divine blessing, he is tricked into giving it to Jacob, his smooth son, rather than Esau, the hairy one, after their mother dresses her favorite in goatskins.

Jacob leaves home to herd sheep for Laban, with whose lovely daughter Rachel he soon falls deeply in love. For seven years he labors for the right to marry her. Then, on the wedding night, Laban pulls a trick by sending his older daughter Leah to Jacob’s bed instead. Before daylight reveals the substitution, they have consummated the nuptials nine times, conceiving a son, Reuben. Leah bears Jacob several more children before Jacob’s subsequent union with Rachel produces Joseph and later Benjamin, whose birth proves fatal to Rachel.

One of Jacob’s tales concerns his famous dream of a stairway to Heaven, where he wrestles from an angel a blessing that his numerous posterity will be called Israel after him. By two wives and two concubines he begets twelve sons, whose descendants form the tribes of Israel. He also has a daughter, Dinah, who is wooed and kidnapped by and then married to the Prince of Shechem. Her brothers devise a gruesome revenge. In negotiations with her abductor, they secure a promise that Shechemites will adopt certain Hebrew customs, including circumcision. Then, while all the men of Shechem are recovering from their wounds, Joseph’s brothers fall upon the city and massacre them. The shepherd king is horrified by his sons’ violence, especially the excesses of Simeon and Levi.

In the second novel, The Young Joseph, Joseph’s brothers turn on him. More beautiful, imaginative, and virtuous than they, Joseph faces problems with self-absorption and the envy of others. His brothers’ resentment is exacerbated by Jacob’s favoritism, particularly evidenced by his giving to Joseph the coat of many colors, an elaborately embroidered garment worn by Leah on her wedding night. Joseph further chafes them by reporting his dreams of angels, heavenly bodies, and sheaves of wheat bowing down to him. In chagrin, the brothers withdraw from Jacob’s tents and pitch camp a few miles away, until Jacob sends Joseph to retrieve them. When he arrives, they beat him and dump him into a pit. Reuben saves his life by deflecting the brothers’ blows and later returns in secret to pull him out of the pit. He finds it empty: Joseph has been rescued by traveling salesmen, who pay twenty pieces of silver for him and lead him into Egypt. The brothers present the torn and bloody coat to Jacob, allowing him to think that his favorite son has been devoured by wild beasts.

The third novel, Joseph in Egypt, deals with slavery and sex. Joseph is sold to Potiphar, a high government official and friend of Ikhnaton, the Pharaoh of Egypt. At birth, Potiphar was castrated in an act of religious piety by his parents, but he is nevertheless yoked with Mut in ceremonial wedlock. The upright Mont-kaw, his overseer, recognizes Joseph’s genius and arranges an introduction to his owner. Joseph soon wins Potiphar’s favor with a charming discussion of artificial pollination. He is promoted from gardener and dumbwaiter to majordomo, but obstacles persist. The malicious dwarf Dudu thwarts him by helping Mut make sexual advances to Joseph. Often she orders Joseph to attend her privately in the palace, but Joseph always turns these sessions into business briefings on his work in the household. Eyebrows are raised around the palace after a ladies’ party where, while they are peeling oranges with sharp knives, Mut calls Joseph in to pour the wine. Such is his beauty that the ladies gasp and cut their fingers. Years of frustration culminate when Mut nearly bites through her tongue and implores Joseph, “Thleep—with me!” After she suggests that they kill Potiphar, Joseph flees as she tears off his jacket. Dudu stirs Potiphar’s suspicion, and Mut lodges a false charge of rape. Potiphar transfers Joseph to Pharaoh’s prison, ordering the snitch Dudu to bear the expected physical punishment instead.

The fourth novel, Joseph the Provider, is a spectacular success story. The warden Mai-sachme puts Joseph in charge of the other prisoners, including Pharaoh’s chief baker and chief wine steward, recently implicated in an unsuccessful coup attempt. When they are troubled by strange dreams, Joseph explains their meanings: that the wine steward will be found innocent and the baker guilty, and so they are. A reputation for dream interpretation brings Joseph to Pharaoh’s attention. Joseph wins the boy-king’s heart in long conversations on theology, governmental administration, and dreams. Pharaoh had dreamed of seven skinny cows consuming seven fat ones and of seven withered ears of corn swallowing seven full ones. Joseph deftly leads Pharaoh to see in the dreams a prophecy of famine. To avert disaster, he makes Joseph his chief administrator. By Joseph’s wise governance, an enormous grain surplus is amassed and the great landowners and neighboring district kings are brought under Pharaoh’s thumb as the crops fail and assets must be liquidated.

Meanwhile, Joseph’s sister Tamar manages “to squeeze herself into the history of the world.” As a girl she had absorbed wisdom at Jacob’s knee. Then, one after another, she weds two of Judah’s sons, both of whom soon die, leaving her a childless widow. Jacob will not let her marry Judah’s third son, so she masquerades as a temple prostitute and seduces Judah himself, thus founding the line of descent leading to the Messiah.

Famine forces Joseph’s brothers to come to Egypt for grain. Shorn and clothed as an Egyptian official, Joseph is not recognized by his half-brothers, who bow down to him now as he had dreamed. On the pretext that they are spies, he takes Simeon hostage, thus forcing them to bring Benjamin to him. On their return, he reveals his identity but takes Benjamin hostage in order to lure Jacob to Goshen. On their way home, the brothers worry about how to break the news to their aged father, whose grip on life might be jolted by either revelation: that Joseph is alive or that Benjamin is being held hostage. The task falls to the musical girl Serah, whose glad song penetrates Jacob’s understanding without breaking his heart. He consents to be carried to Goshen, and there he is finally reunited with his beloved son. Joseph asks forgiveness, but instead Jacob bestows the blessing on Judah and adopts Joseph’s two sons as his own, since Joseph’s achievement is so worldly and so Egyptian.

The Characters

The story begins and ends in Jacob. His spirit presides over the whole tetralogy. One of the original God-dreamers, his “mild and pensive piety” is a pure, if not simple, expression of his somewhat timid yet profoundly thoughtful nature. Still, he plays the rogue. He tricks Esau out of his birthright. He gets the better of Laban when dividing the flock by settling for lambs of mixed color and then causing the ewes to conceive such offspring. Near death, he confuses everybody by crossing his hands as he settles blessings on the heads of Joseph’s sons. Yet Jacob maintains his resolute morality to the end. Disgust for Egyptian customs is the lodestar of his morality. Since revelry, prostitution, and bestiality have there been raised to the level of religious rite, Jacob considers Egyptian society to be a version of Hell, based on bondage, error, and death. It is profoundly ironic that, before being laid to rest in the tomb of his fathers, Jacob’s body is mummified in Egyptian fashion.

Retelling history’s oldest story of personal love, Thomas Mann drew a most feeling portrait of Rachel. More is made of her emotions and inner feelings than her outward beauty. In her selfless suffering, she attains archetypal significance. Her chaste beauty and noble charm survive in Joseph. Her affection for Jacob helps Judaism become a religion of love; Jacob’s fondness for her seems as ardent as his faith in God when he gazes into her black eyes brimming with tears of joy and sorrow. Rachel shares Jacob’s antic spirit, once taking revenge on her father by absconding with his precious household idols. Just as delicate as she is lovely, Rachel suffers mental anguish in childlessness and physical pain in childbirth. Dying in labor, she typifies the savior whose death brings life.

Joseph is the most complex and compelling character of all. As he walks through the streets, women mount the housetops and throw their rings down to him. His godlike beauty, eloquence, and charisma astound all whom he meets and his chroniclers as well; even the account in Genesis lingers on his legend. Yet in Mann’s story, Joseph’s personal development overshadows his natural gifts. As a boy uniquely beloved, he expects people to love him more than they love themselves. His dreamy egotism is shattered by his fall into the pit. Realizing his folly, Joseph allows the energies of his ego to flow from arrogance into the common weal. He accepts that his lot in life is to play out an ancient pattern, to undergo a tragic withdrawal before returning to glory. His bondage in Egypt replays the pattern. There, Joseph develops the virtues on which his triumph depends. His chastity, loyalty, and sympathy are tested and proved.

Joseph is altogether more modern in outlook than Jacob: more volatile and witty, less single-minded, and more practical. His manner is far from patriarchal. Joseph’s complexity is epitomized in the epithet tam. Originally it meant one who is upright, a dweller in tents, but it came to connote the intellectual agility of a wanderer who loves God, the kind of man who can handle the glad and sorry aspects of a double-sided life.

In his portrayal of Mut, Mann developed the personal, as opposed to the mythical, side. Although she had been well-adjusted to her role as the official wife of Pharaoh’s eunuch, she begins to find her personal life empty. Understandably, her passions take human shape when Joseph enters her life, as a slave, hers to command. For two years, she tries to conceal desire behind polite conversation, but her womanhood has been aroused, and all reserve thaws. On a holiday when the house is almost empty, she throws herself at Joseph, is rebuffed, and recoils in panic. Her happiness could have been ruined, but everyone seems to understand, and her husband’s evenhanded disposition of the affair restores their intimacy.

The brothers are a mixed lot. Collectively, they represent the ordinary people who do not appreciate the heightened artistic sensibilities of a man such as Joseph. Six are born to the dog-headed Leah: Zebulun, who hates herding sheep and longs for adventure at sea; bony Issachar, who loves the quiet life; the violent “twins” Simeon and Levi; Judah, a sensitive soul of leonine lust; and Reuben, the eldest, a big, soft, excitable man, who loses his birthright through shameful intercourse with his father’s concubine. Two are born to Leah’s maid, Zilpah: sweet-toothed Asher, a seeker of pleasure, and the forthright Gad, as stubborn as a butting goat. Two are born to Rachel’s maid, Bilhah: subtle Dan, a stickler by nature, with a judicious turn of mind, and the fleet Naphtali, who has the gift of gab. Only Rachel’s son Benjamin delights in his remarkable brother Joseph. Tied to the apron strings, he receives from Jacob more protection than affection, never knowing the effusive love and hate that Joseph experiences.

Critical Context

A work such as Joseph and His Brothers occurs seldom in literary history. So extraordinary and idiosyncratic an undertaking deserves the epithet “unique.” Formal literary categories shed less light on such singular achievements than most, yet Mann’s tetralogy belongs on the shelf with other modern comic epics in prose, such as John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678-1684), Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615), and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-1767). It fits the epic formula, which calls for a hero of superhuman capacity and transnational significance, an episodic structure, divine intervention, and a sustained elevated style.

Although a tone of high seriousness and didactic purpose pervade it, Joseph and His Brothers is a comic masterpiece. In tragedy, things do not work out for the better, but they do here. Tragedy involves the loss or lack of something at a crucial moment, but here is God’s plenty of everything. For example, time is abundant: Tragedy tends not to happen until, somehow, time runs out; here, there is time for everything. Events have plenty of time not only to happen, but to recur in the mythical cycle and to be remembered ad infinitum, as well. There is always time for retelling, for savoring the ironies of intent and event, and for ridiculous magnification or reduction through interpretation. In its use of time, handling of detail, vast repetition, and cosmic perspective, the whole manner of Joseph and His Brothers is comic rather than tragic.

Acutely sensitive to irony and nuance, Mann’s comic genius saturates episode, dialogue, and description. The reader delights in the orange-peeling party, the vignette of the city of cats, the satire on impish Dudu, the sly retorts, and the sharp epithets. Joseph considers the artful jest as God’s best gift to man, “the profoundest knowledge we have of that complex, questionable thing we call life.” Jacob’s roguery and Joseph’s felicitous rapport enable them to achieve their serious purposes. Where would either have got without the comic sensibility to pull it off time after time?

Had it been composed by a tranquil scribe in placid times, this epic would be astonishing. That it came down from the most turbulent time in its author’s life and the history of Europe is even more impressive. The work was received quite propitiously. Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929 while still working on Joseph and His Brothers. Early the next year, he toured the Near East, storing up memories of scene and lore which come to life in the Egypt novels. He returned to Germany and there finished The Young Joseph and began Joseph in Egypt before leaving Germany again on a trip from which he would never return. Exiled by the Nazis, Mann became a wanderer like Joseph and his ancestors. His daughter managed to recover the manuscript from their home, which Adolf Hitler had confiscated.

Completed in the United States in 1942, the tetralogy celebrates a victory of enlightenment over darkness. The conflict in Egypt between followers of Amun and Aton reflects the division of public opinion in Europe on Nazism. The cult of Amun uses fear and bloodshed to enforce a policy of reactionary nationalism, just as the storm troopers did. Certain salient characteristics of Nazi officialdom are parodied in the portraits of the vicious dwarf Dudu and the high priest Beknechons. Mann later compared Joseph and his administration with Henry Wallace and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Both administrations succeeded in feeding the poor and dominating foreign powers. Both radically altered the relationship between the government and the economy.

The Joseph novels prophetically urge Western civilization not to take the road of Fascism toward bondage, lies, and death. It is significant that Mann found a higher road—toward life, prosperity, and love—in the tradition of the Jews, whom Hitler persecuted. Mann’s epic sought to restore the blessings of civilization by enlightening Europe in its darkest hour.

Bibliography

Bab, Julius. “Joseph and His Brothers,” in The Stature of Thomas Mann, 1947.

Hamburger, Kate. Thomas Manns Roman “Joseph und seine Bruder,” 1945.

Hatfield, Henry. “Myths Ancient and Modern,” in From the Magic Mountain: Mann’s Later Masterpieces, 1979.

Mann, Thomas. “The Joseph Novels,” in The Stature of Thomas Mann, 1947.

Van Doren, Mark. “Joseph and His Brothers: A Comedy in Four Parts,” in Thomas Mann: A Collection of Critical Essays, 1964.