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Difference and Demeanor:Literary Anti-Semitism inThomas Mann's Joseph NovelsFranka Marquardt aa Institut für GermanistikPublished online: 07 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Franka Marquardt (2005) Difference and Demeanor: Literary Anti-Semitism in Thomas Mann's Joseph Novels, The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture,Theory, 80:3, 228-253, DOI: 10.3200/GERR.80.3.228-253

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Difference and Demeanor:Literary Anti-Semitism in

Thomas Mann’s Joseph NovelsFRANKA MARQUARDT

ince Thomas Mann himself repeatedly claimed not to have writ-ten a Judenbuch but to have sung a “heiter-ernstes Lied vom

Menschen” instead, with only very few exceptions,1 Joseph und seineBrüder was never really read as a Judenbuch, that is, as a novel inti-mately related to Judaism. Despite all political and private upheavalsbetween Mann’s first inspiration on his journey through Egypt in 1925and the closing sentences of Joseph, der Ernährer written in his Cali-fornian exile in 1942, this self-explanation remains remarkably stable.Immediately after the completion of the second volume, Mann notesin a letter to Eduard Jedidjah Chavkin dated August 1934: “Der‘Joseph’ will zwar eigentlich und zuletzt kein Judenbuch sein, sondernein Bilder- und Geschichtenbuch vom Menschen sein,”2 only to repeatthis verdict in almost the same wording ten important years later. InAugust 1944, he publishes an article in the New York magazine GoodHousekeeping under the somewhat general heading “The Bible,” inwhich he confirms: “‘Joseph und seine Brüder’ ist kein Juden-Roman,sondern ein heiter-ernstes Lied vom Menschen.”3

Thus, scholarly research on Mann’s opus magnum seems only tohave followed in the author’s footsteps in refusing to read his biblicalnovel as a Judenbuch. Instead, the Joseph novels have almost unan-imously been acclaimed for their elevation of this particular “myth” tothe realm of universal humanity, in the words again already coinedand canonized by the author himself, for the “Humanisierung desMythos”4 that the four novels allegedly undertake. Both Mann and themajority of his readers, so it seems, felt significantly more inclined to-ward the universal and the general than toward the singular and par-ticular. In the course of its reception, universal readings of the novelas allgemein-menschlich outweigh perceptions of its specifically Jew-ish affiliations by far.

Yet, in resorting to this story of all stories taken from this book ofbooks, neither the author nor his critics can avoid coming into contact

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with the Jewish dimensions of their object. At least at second glance,it should strike us as surprising that of all “myths,” Mann chose toretell this one in order not to write a Judenbuch. Whether he and welike it or not, by choosing the “schöne Geschichte von Joseph undseinen Brüdern” (GW 5: 1822), Mann turned to the founding narrativeof the twelve tribes of Israel, that is, to one of the founding narrativesof Judaism. These stories were told first and foremost by Jews, forJews, and about Jews,5 and therefore lie, as Heinrich Heine and JanAssmann would put it, at the heart of the Jews’ “portative Vaterland.”6

So, we might ask why Mann should have chosen this fundamentallyJewish story in order not to write a Jewish book.

Another facet of the widely recognized and constantly reproducedintentio auctoris seems hardly less irritating; for Mann also repeatedlystated his intention to disown the “fascistische[] [sic] Dunkelmänner[]”of the “Mythos” in general by taking this particular “Mythos” fromthem and restoring it to humanity.7 Yet, of all possible “myths,” thefascists themselves certainly did not prefer the stories of the so-called“Old Testament.” Why, then, does Mann insist on reclaiming this mythfrom them—and in calling them Dunkelmänner at the same time re-sorting to a compound of anti-Semitic connotation8—if they them-selves were obviously drawn to other myths so much more?

Well into the present and notably up to the most recent introductionto Mann’s novels,9 it is generally agreed that the Joseph novels are tobe understood from the outset as an act of overt opposition to Nazismby virtue of their biblical Stoff.10 A similarly widespread agreement fol-lows Mann’s own interpretation of Joseph as a universal Menschheits-buch as opposed to a Judenbuch. And yet, reminiscences of the inti-mate relation between Joseph, his fathers and brothers, and Judaismare quite obviously present enough to be reactivated under certain cir-cumstances. Both in research and in literary journalism, the Josephnovels are always referred to as proof of the contrary, whenever tracesof literary anti-Semitism in Mann’s other works are disclosed. Simplyby pondering the Bible during the Nazi era, thus runs the argument,Mann is ultimately above all suspicion.11 In more than one respect,this argument appears problematic: On the one hand, it reduces thephenomenon of anti-Semitism to the reign of the fascists in Germany,and so disregards or at least marginalizes its long and fateful continu-ity “through the ages”;12 on the other hand, it excludes the possibilityof unintended anti-Semitism, as if it were only to be found where it wasconsciously posited. Finally, and with special regard to scholarly re-

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search on Mann, it draws an apodictic conclusion where the ex-amination has not yet taken place. Yet again, Mann himself gave di-rections. In a letter to Ludwig Lewisohn on April 19, 1948, he reaffirmsalmost indignantly: “Ich habe vier Bände lang den jüdischen Mythosverherrlicht, hundert mal dem Antisemitismus meine Verachtungbezeugt [. . .]” (SK 309). So might Joseph, after all, or at least undercertain circumstances, be regarded as a Judenbuch?

It seems as if the question of Joseph’s relation to Judaism andtherefore also to anti-Semitism has already been answered, one wayor the other, before it was ever seriously posed. Depending on the per-spective, Joseph sometimes has nothing at all to do with Jews, andsometimes Joseph has to do with nothing but Jews and Judaism, andthen implicitly also with the rejection of anti-Semitism in whateverform. In view of both the ambivalent intentio auctoris and the equallyambivalent reception of Mann’s biblical tetralogy, a new perspectiveseems of need, which disregards both the author’s self-explanationsand his mostly affirmative critics. In dissecting both their premises,the question now arising can only focus on how, and no longer onwhether, the novels deal with Jews, Judaism, and “Jewishness” at all,as they are so closely entangled with a specific Judenbuch by way oftheir Ur-Kunde (GW 4: 9; 5: 1328).

But the simple observation that Joseph and his brothers are modeledon an indisputably Jewish text raises a whole set of questions that liesbeyond what is conventionally regarded as literary anti-Semitism. Astheir common titles often disclose, studies along these lines usually relyon only one aspect of the text for their analysis of “the image of the Jew,”that is, only on the one layer of imagery. While this reduction of literatureto only one of its many dimensions appears questionable in itself,13 its application to the Joseph novels seems particularly insufficient, as theirentanglement with “Jewishness” goes much further.

From this broader perspective, it is most remarkable right from thebeginning, that is, already on the Höllenfahrt, that the novel itself—and not only its author’s self-explanation—seems keen not to dealwith Jews and Judaism, or at least not with these alone. In the beginning, as we learn, at the bottom of the famous “Brunnen derVergangenheit,” everyone and everything is alike. On closer scrutiny,all things and all people can be traced to one and the same origin, andthere they all fade into uniformity: “[. . .] und aller Dinge Ursprung ver-liert sich bei schärferem Hinsehen in den Tagen des Set” (GW 4: 23).Everyone and everything dates back to one common tradition of

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thinking, being, and believing, and one common heritage that all reli-gions initially sprang from:

Eine lange, auf wahrster Selbstempfindung des Menschen beruhendeDenküberlieferung, entsprungen in frühen Tagen, als Erbgut eingegangenin die Religionen, Prophetien und einander ablösenden Erkenntnislehren[. . .], an welche[] sich wandelbare, doch im Entscheidenden überein-stimmende Lehren und Berichte knüpfen. (4: 39)

Be it Noah or Utnapischtim, be it Rachel, Ischtar, or Mut-em-enet, beit Joseph, Gilgamesch, Hermes, Tammuz, or even Jesus, Joseph undseine Brüder emerges as a boundless mythological melting pot. In ac-cordance at least with one part of the author’s stated intent, the nov-els enact the fundamental “sameness” of all stories and gods and areonly to be read as variations of the one and only universal Mensch-heitslied.

And so already, the opening chapter of the Joseph cycle, with its start-ing point at an only “partial,” “conditional” beginning—“So gibt es An-fänge bedingter Art, welche den Ur-Beginn der besonderen Überlieferungeiner bestimmten Gemeinschaft, Volkheit oder Glaubensfamilie prak-tisch-tatsächlich bilden” (GW 4: 9)—significantly exceeds the self-interpretation of those whose stories this story then makes unlimited useof. The children of Israel, and thus the novel right from the start, con-stantly confuse this only partial beginning of their “personal affairs” withthe beginning of human affairs in general14—which is, of course, nothingbut a grand misunderstanding.

Here on the Höllenfahrt, a basic structure of the four novels alreadybegins to surface. Throughout the whole text and on several of its lay-ers at the same time, the “bene Israel” (GW 4: 158) appear neitherparticularly different nor in any way special, but just like everyone elseand, on the whole, with only minor variations, more or less the same.Right from the beginning, the text makes a notable effort to depictthem as merging perfectly with the rest of mankind, to whose univer-sal narrative origins the Höllenfahrt takes us. Israel’s cult and culture;its God and stories; and even, as we will see later, Israel’s bodies, fea-tures, and dress are not different or special, not particular or strange,but rather ordinary, quite average, and basically familiar.

So far, so widely agreed and indeed acclaimed. In times of politicallymanifest inequality of Jews, when the anti-Semitic discourse of exclu-sion became fatal reality, by this constellation the Joseph novels mayindeed seem to take on the “oppositionelle Rolle” that Mann did not in-tend, but did not object to either—a role, nevertheless, that he attributed

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to his novels only with hindsight. Certainly, at the time of their composi-tion, the universal equality and “sameness” of the Israelites and the restof mankind were anything but commonly accepted (not only) in NaziGermany; and so, this setting within the Joseph novels must seem, andhas in fact only been seen, as most laudable. But if we listen carefully,the novels speak a rather different language than the one the intentioauctoris and its followers have generally perceived.

The most central theme and subject of the whole tetralogy, that is,the universal equality and “sameness” of mankind, is partly triggered,but partly also subverted, by a narrative movement that perpetuatesthe anti-Semitic discourse exactly where the author and his inter-preters claim to discern a clear break. For in the Joseph novels, too,this universal “sameness” is not at all self-evident, but rather tem-porarily suspended; there is, after all, a small span of inequality anddifference somewhere between the original identity of everyone andeverything “in den Tagen des Set,” and the utopian identity and alike-ness of all nations and narratives in the Happy End of this “schöneGeschichte.” And yet again, this universal history of mankind linksthis remarkable state of transition to stories about Jews and Judaismas at least temporary carriers of “difference” and “Otherness.” Foronly when these have eventually been leveled, as is in the end thecase, can this story of humanity also be told as a story of progressive“humaneness.”

In contrast to what one might expect or have hoped for in view of itstimes, the temporary “difference” of the “bene Israel” is not attributed tothem from without, but rather from within; their “otherness” is not im-posed on them by their neighbors, but guarded strictly by themselves,and hence, their becoming equal is nothing they acquire against outerobstacles or oppression, but rather something their inner dispositionfirmly stands against. So once again in this great narrative of equalityand fraternity, it appears to be the Jewish self-definition as not onlyparticular and special, but indeed as distinguished and superior thatstands in the way of the original order of things and at least temporar-ily obstructs its utopian restoration. The Jews in this story are “out-siders” not so much by way of exclusion, but far more through theirown strategies of inclusion by which they set themselves apart. Sohere, Jewish “difference” is solely constructed by the Jews themselves,especially by Jaakob, “the father,” who proudly cultivates the notion ofJewish superiority; to make it a happy ending, this must be—and inJoseph eventually is—overcome.

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This fundamental structure of the text that renders Jaakob, his God,and his stories the same where they themselves claim to be differentis omnipresent throughout. One level that reenacts this maneuver ofthose holding themselves to be special has just been touched on.From the explicit melting together of all themes and motifs from allkinds of tales and stories about the creation of man and his ancienthistory, the fundamental gesture of the text emerges; the “same” is asdominant as it is laudable, while the “Other” can only be perceived asdespicable and obstructive, including, by the way, the specific tech-niques of biblical narrative15 that Joseph explicitly disregards, sincebiblical stories are nothing but variations of otherwise universally re-told tales.

With this constellation, Joseph und seine Brüder is of course in thebest of companies. Mann’s treatment of the so-called “Old Testament”corresponds entirely with its traditional treatment in Christian con-texts. As the Christian renaming already suggests, the “new” covenantand testament between God and mankind has dissolved and suc-ceeded its “old” predecessor. “Old” prophecies have led to the arrivalof what was promised, former prefigurations have induced their fulfill-ments and thus no longer apply; the Jews as readers, writers, and re-cipients of the Book of Books have been disinherited by the Christiansas God’s newly chosen people. So at the core, renarration as occupa-tion of this originally Jewish territory in Joseph und seine Brüder onlyreenacts the dominant Christian reading of the Hebrew Scripturessince the Church Fathers. It was they who already rehearsed this formof expropriation of the Jews’ portable Vaterland, pervading and en-larging its specific boundaries toward the Allgemein-Menschliche, orat least toward what is generally Christian, and thereby driving its orig-inal inhabitants into exile.

Looking at it from this angle, Mann can hardly take credit for theprojection of exactly this myth of all myths onto the universallyhuman, a projection that has long since taken place, at least for thedominant Christian reading of the Bible:

[O]nly once in the history of culture has a book had its entire meaning al-tered simply by renaming it: by renaming it, to be specific, the “Old” Tes-tament. Renaming, that is, is re-interpretation. This fact is so common asto seem almost trivial, nevertheless a crucial one for our understanding ofthe culture we create and the culture that creates us.16

Whereas the close affiliation of the Joseph novels with this tradi-tional “re-interpretation” may not seem surprising—although cer-

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tainly problematic—the fact that their readers and scholars havechosen to ignore these entanglements with questionable traditionscalls for revision. Reflections of every non-Jewish reading of theHebrew Scriptures as an act of “reading someone else’s mail,” asthe theologian Paul van Buren concisely put it,17 are of course byno means lacking only in Mann’s Joseph. The novels’ leveling of alldifferences, their readings of the Genesis stories as universal—so notonly their “reading,” but also in fact their “rewriting” and even “re-ad-dressing” of someone else’s mail—hardly clash with most Christianapproaches to the Hebrew Bible, which can only be read over Israel’sshoulder.

This act of occupation—or, maybe, assimilation—that the Josephnovels perform on the level of themes and motifs is perhaps the weak-est illustration of the multifaceted elimination of (almost) everything“Jewish” from this Judenbuch. At least Christians have generally be-come far too familiar with this way of reading the Bible to recognizethe dissolution of Judaism underlying this mode of reception and in-terpretation. Even Christian theology itself has only recently, that is,only a good while after the completion of the Joseph novels, begun toreflect on its treatment of this intrinsically Jewish Book of Books asthe touchstone for its self-definition and self-comprehension. Thefounding of the “Arbeitsgemeinschaft Juden und Christen auf demDeutschen Evangelischen Kirchentag” in 1961 may mark the mostimportant step in this direction, at least in Germany.18

Possibly more evident, and yet closely connected to exactly this underlying structure of the novels, are other layers of the text by whichalleged universal “sameness” is directed against Israel’s self-imposed“difference” and “exclusion” more explicitly. Jaakob’s efforts to rein-stall “purity” to the blood running in the veins of his family, for exam-ple, are as enthusiastic as they are comical, since all evidence speaksagainst him. As the subversive narrator hastens to inform us, the fore-father’s undertaking is perfectly absurd:

Nicht einmal im Traum aber konnten die Leute El eljons ihrem Zusam-menhange Einheit und Reinheit des Blutes zuschreiben. Da war baby-lonisch-sumerische – also nicht durchaus semitische – Art hin-durchgegangen durch arabisches Wüstenwesen, aus Gerar, ausMuzri-Land, aus Ägypten selbst hatten weitere Elemente sich bei-gemischt. (GW 4: 129)

The passage from the first novel (1933) is paralleled by an episode involume 4 (1942), in which Jaakob again desperately tries to include

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his daughters-in-law of dubious descent in the blood-union and blood-purity of his “tribe.”

Es gab in Dingen der Abstammung von Jaakobs Schwiegertöchternmanche Beschönigungen und Einbildungen, an denen zugunsten derBlutseinheit des geistlichen Stammes halb und halb festgehalten wurde,obgleich sie auf schwachen Füßen standen –,

which again leads the cynical narrator to remark, “Blutseinheit istimmer nachzuweisen, wenn man den Rahmen weit genug zieht” (GW5: 1540–41).

In a laudable attempt to relate these extracts to the time of theircomposition, it has been suggested that these blood-passages inJoseph be read as “Mann’s own explicitly anti-racist aside.”19 Super-ficially, this might at first seem plausible, considering its unconcealedpolemics against the category of Blutseinheit and Blutsreinheit. Buton second thought, the distribution of positions appears somewhatdisturbing. Apart from the altogether striking prominence of bloodthroughout the Joseph novels, and also throughout Mann’s DasGesetz, published in 1943,20 the text indeed inveighs against the con-struction of “different blood,” yet not in opposition to racist exclusion,but rather in polemical opposition to Jewish constructions of inclusionvia blood. Here, the “Einheit des Menschengeistes,” a concept Mannstudied intensely in Alfred Jeremias,21 is obviously supplemented bythe “Einheit des Menschenblutes” that Jaakob-Israel refutes so vigor-ously. It is Israel’s self-imposed “Otherness,” even of “blood” now, thatstands in the way of Einheit and Menschheit. With a twinkle in his eye,the narrator seems to see himself in silent agreement with the reader.While we are all well aware of Jaakob’s “sameness,” he himself, the“störrige Kuh,”22 as he is repeatedly referred to, still passionatelyclings to the fantasy of his “specialness” and particularity, evenagainst all evidence.

One might object to these readings of the “blood” passages in Josephas malignant or one-sided and argue that this kind of literary anti-Semitism that can only be uncovered with some interpretatory effortsays less about the text and more about its reader. Two studies on Mann,both published in 1999, may illustrate the contrary. Although neither ofthem can be regarded as intrinsically anti-Semitic, just as Mann himselfobviously cannot, the apparent innocence with which these studiescomplete what the texts only hint at betrays the enormous suggestivepotential and, so it seems, the virtually irresistible obtrusiveness of theanti-Semitic undercurrent in Mann’s novels. What Joseph and Doktor

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Faustus “only” insinuate, Julia Graf and Christian Hülshörster spell outwithout hesitation. According to Graf’s investigation of Joseph, “ist esnicht zu übersehen, daß sich ihm [Mann] gerade das religiöse jüdischeSelbstverständnis als göttlich gewähltes Volk für eine Spiegelung desdeutschen Nationalismus anbot.”23 And according to Hülshörster in hisresearch on Oskar Goldberg’s influence on Mann, it appears just as unquestionable that it should be the Jewish impresario Saul Fitelberg inDoktor Faustus who discusses the “innere Identität des aggressivendeutschen Nationalismus mit dem jüdischen Erwähltheitsglauben.”24

Here, it becomes most obvious that the Jews Jaakob and Fitelberg canhardly serve as mouthpieces for Mann’s “anti-racist asides.” On thecontrary, Jaakob’s uncompromising insistence on the inner-Jewishfunction of “blood” as a means of exclusion lets the Jewish founding fa-ther himself merge with the prototype of an early fascist. The implica-tion of the novel that is made explicit in these two studies is: It is in theseallegedly Jewish footsteps that Nazi Germany only needed to tread.

Otherwise, and in apparent opposition to their self-definition, the Israelites of the Joseph novels are not depicted as in any way special,neither on the grounds of their god, nor of his stories, nor of their formsof cult and worship. Again, it is “der alte Jaakob” who is not only called“die störrige Kuh” but who, in analogy to the Judaeophobia of theChurch Fathers, also reenacts astounding “stubbornness” and obstinacy,again in clinging firmly to old and outdated rights and rituals. In parallelto traditional Christian readings of the Hebrew Bible, Mann’s Joseph nov-els establish a bipolar structure, with one end marking the “stubborn”sphere of the father and the other reaching into the universally pliant(weltkindlich-schmiegsam [GW 5: 963]) sphere of the son. Right fromthe beginning, when we encounter young Joseph babbling pagan gods’names and worshipping the stars, Jaakob is constructed as his comple-mentary opposite. Unlike the son, the father is entirely wrapped up instrict and restrictive obedience to his jealous god, by whose election hesees himself distinguished from all peoples. Jaakob’s positively absurdrejection of everything “different,” everything “other,” especially ofeverything “äffisch-ägyptisch,” (GW 4: 97) but also of anything aesthet-ically complex or enthralling, everything ambivalent or otherwisemultidimensional, serves as a leitmotif throughout;25 a rejection that—apart from his own Schelmereien, before he himself became father—Jaakob is only able to overcome when he follows the son and reachesEgypt. The father remains strict (almost) until the end, while the son notonly follows a different star, but right from the opening scene also always

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appears to be following more than just one. To us, this cannot reallycome as a surprise. On our very first encounter with Joseph, we are already informed that, in certain respects, Joseph’s “gifts of the spirit”outstrip those of his father by far, for he is “[. . .] außerdem aber, vomVater her, ausgestattet mit Geistesgaben, durch welche er diesen wohlgar in gewissem Sinne noch übertraf” (GW 4: 10).

So, only when Jaakob finally follows “his calf” onto the strangers’“acre” does his frozenness gradually begin to melt. On his way “down”to Egypt, to be precise, right under the Unterweisungsbaum of allplaces, Jaakob begins to teach the ultimately Christian concept of theHoly Trinity:

Der Lehrende prägte das ein. Elohim war Einer. Aber dann kam es dochwieder so heraus, als seien es mehrere, etwa drei. [. . .] Er sprach näm-lich erstens vom Vätergott oder auch Gott, dem Vater, zweitens von einemGuten Hirten, der uns, seine Schafe, weide, und drittens von Einem, dener den “Engel” nannte, und von dem die Siebzig den Eindruck gewannen,daß er uns mit Taubenflügeln überschatte. Sie machten Elohim aus, diedreifältige Einheit. (GW 5: 1733–34)

Although we must by now have already realized it, we are reminded explicitly that the ways in which the children of Israel pay tribute totheir god are essentially no different from the cult and culture of theother children of Canaan.26 Israel’s self-definition as special and supe-rior is again dismantled, and again with notably comical effect:

Hatten die Baalskinder es anders gemacht? Hatten nicht auch sie das Blutvon Lämmern und Böcken hinlaufen lassen auf dem Altar und den star-renden Stein damit bestrichen? Allerdings; die Kinder Israels aber taten’sin anderem Geist und in gebildeterer Frömmigkeit, was hauptsächlichdarin seinen Ausdruck fand, daß sie nach dem Gottesessen nicht paar-weise miteinander scherzten, wenigstens nicht öffentlich. (GW 5: 1732)

That Joseph, meanwhile, has entered into several other covenantswith several other fathers and some other gods27 follows the history ofthe church as well as the plot of the novel. After all, already on the Höl-lenfahrt we learn that Jaakob is more royal than the king, that is,“strikter als gewisse höchste Stellen selbst, denen seine Strengegeweiht war” (GW 4: 27), so that his unflustered clinging to themseems all the more laughable. Joseph, by contrast, eventually evenagrees on the identity of Pharaoh’s god in the sky with his own God inheaven (“Vater am Himmel” vs. “Vater im Himmel” [GW 5: 1468]),28

so that now even the God of Israel, in contrast to his strictest servant,has become successfully assimilated.

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In the end (or perhaps right from the beginning), the novels alsomake use of a particularly obtrusive kind of anti-Semitism that can—literally—almost not be overlooked. For, in the end other than in thebeginning, Joseph has not only become a wholesale Egyptian in “fea-tures and demeanor” (“nach Physiognomie und Gebärde” [GW 5:963]),29 but has also for the first time become “beautiful.” Here, youngJoseph is by no means beautiful from the beginning; his beauty is anadditional result of his separation from Israel and his ascension inEgypt.

Wir müssen uns, um das zu verstehen, vor allen Dingen dem Blickpunkteines gewissen arabisch-dunklen Geschmackes anbequemen, einemästhetischen Gesichtswinkel, der der praktisch wirksame war und unterdem betrachtet der Junge tatsächlich dermaßen hübsch und schön erschien, daß er auf den ersten Blick mehrmals halb und halb für einenGott gehalten wurde. (GW 4: 65)30

When examining Joseph, in other words, we must apply a different setof aesthetics in the beginning than in the end, when his body has finally adjusted.31 For our contemporary “European,” “enlightened”taste, as opposed to the “dark Arabian” taste of his times, Joseph’sfeatures are perhaps adorable, but at the same time “defective.”32 Hisface is said to be

liebenswürdig [. . .] noch in seinen Fehlern. Es waren zum Beispiel dieNüstern seiner ziemlich kurzen und sehr geraden Nase zu dick; aber da hierdurch die Flügel gebläht schienen, trat etwas von Lebhaftigkeit, Affektund fliegendem Stolz in die Physiognomie, was sich mit der Freundlichkeitder Augen gut zusammenfügte. Den Ausdruck hochmütiger Sinnlichkeit,den aufgeworfene Lippen hervorrufen, wollen wir nicht rügen. Er kanntäuschen, und außerdem müssen wir, gerade was die Lippenbildung betrifft, den Blickpunkt von Land und Leuten wahren. Dagegen würden wiruns für berechtigt halten, die Gegend zwischen Mund und Nase zu gewölbtzu finden [. . .]. Die Stirne war glatt in ihrer unteren Hälfte, über den starkenund schöngezeichneten Brauen, aber ausgebuchtet weiter oben, unter demdichten, schwarzen, von einem hellen Lederbande umfaßten und außer-dem mit dem Myrtenkranz geschmückten Haar, das beutelartig in denNacken fiel, aber die Ohren frei ließ, mit denen es gute Ordnung gehabthätte, wenn nicht ihre Läppchen etwas fleischig ausgeartet und in dieLänge gezogen gewesen wären, offenbar durch die unnötig großen Silber-ringe, die man schon in der Kindheit hindurchgezogen hatte. (GW 4:65–66)

What we should not “rebuke,”33 we should certainly notice. Even with-out reminiscences of the manifold other “images” of Jews in the works

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of Mann,34 an anti-Semitic profile emerges from this list of pertinentfacial “faults” that stands in full accordance with the catalogue of“Jewish” physiognomies the so-called Rassenkunde drew up parallelto, and just before, the time of Joseph. It is in exactly this light thatyoung Joseph simply looks too “Jewish” to appear beautiful. Foryoung Joseph’s features, the text marks out here in such detail, fit inexactly with the images of the Rassenkunde. Joseph’s nostrils are alittle too “thick” and “dilated”; the “space between mouth and nose” isa little “too full and arched”; the black hair of his body is “thick” and“heavy,” falling “pouch-like,”35 that is, diffusely “animal-like” from hishead; Joseph’s ear lobes are not only “fleshy” by “species” (geartet),but also obviously even exceeding the average of this “species” in“fleshiness” (fleischig ausgeartet)—that is, somewhat “degenerated,”as the German term ausgeartet also connotes36—this list of “defects”betrays the scale by which they are measured. Joseph’s “beauty” isdebatable not so much on account of the taste of his times, but be-cause his “dark Arabian” appearance cannot really appeal to us today.

While the text claims to be talking about “taste” in this passage, it is infact implying something quite different. The explicit reference to the aes-thetics, that is, to the “culture” of Joseph’s time and place, serves as pre-text and covers up the novel’s reflections on nature and, indeed, on race.All of these features from Joseph’s list of facial “defects” can be found al-most literally in the repertoires of the Rassenkunde by which Mann wasof course by no means influenced directly, yet whose inventories of allegedly “Semitic” physiognomies outline the anti-Semitic, that is, biol-ogy-based discourse parameters dominant from the second half of thenineteenth century onward. The most widespread edition of such aRassenkunde in the Weimar Republic, Hans Günther’s Rassenkunde desjüdischen Volkes, was first published in 1922 and had reached its six-teenth edition by 1935. It was so popular, in fact, that a shortened versionwas brought out in 1928 and was soon simply known as the Volksgün-ther.37 Thus, the “images” it outlines may be regarded as generally ac-claimed, if not commonly consented to, and the disturbing proximity ofthe “Jewish” physiognomies in Günther to the biblical Jews in Mann canbe explained as the traces of a discourse that leaves its mark even whereit was quite obviously not actively received. Günther puts it this way:

Auch in den Fällen, wo etwa die Nase eines Juden im Schattenriß diegleiche Form aufweist, wie die Nase eines nordrassischen Menschen, istdoch fast immer die jüdische Nase in der Vorderansicht an der Flei-schigkeit der Flügel zu erkennen.38

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“Die Oberlippe ist gemeinhin kurz und die untere steht vor, was demGesicht einen etwas sinnlichen Ausdruck gibt.”39 “Die Augenbrauensind gewöhnlich deutlich ausgebildet, etwas buschig gegen die Nasehin.”40 And even the remark on Joseph’s ears seems to conform ex-actly to the categories of the racists, according to whom “fleshy” earsare also particularly common among Jews, especially among males.41

The maneuver performed here is marked exactly by the environmen-tal or cultural explanation the novel offers for the size of Joseph’s ears.Since the large silver earrings may at the most be held responsible fortheir length, but certainly not for their abnormal “fleshiness,” the sub-liminal change of register surfaces. There is obviously more wrong withJoseph’s body than with his time’s taste or habits, but explicit referenceto the latter covers up the ensuing detailed expansion on the former.Subtly urged to switch between “culture” and “nature,” social norms andsomatic differences, “other” times and “other” bodies, our attention issuperficially distracted from the racial undercurrent of the passage.

And interesting enough, in the case of the most successful assimilationever, this is not the end of the story. As soon as Joseph reaches Egyptand there becomes an Egyptian through and through—the Germanphrase “mit Haut und Haar” (GW 5: 1305), and, for once, also Lowe-Porter’s translation, “he was Egypt hide and hair,”42 already alluding tothe somatic dimension of this assimilation—his features also undergosignificant changes.

Sein Gesicht war die anmutig verfängliche Beduinenbubenphysiognomievon ehedem nicht mehr; es bewahrte Spuren davon, besonders wenn er,obgleich nichts weniger als kurzsichtig, die Rahelaugen nach Art der Mut-ter auf eine gewisse schleiernde Weise schmal zusammenzog, war abervoller, ernster, auch dunkler von Oberägyptens Sonne, dabei in denZügen regelmäßiger, vornehmer geworden. (GW 5: 1018)

Obviously, Joseph’s former “defects” have now completely dissolveduntil nothing noteworthy is left in the face of the Egyptian that betraysthe original features of the young Hebrew. The traces still linking theyoung Joseph with the Egyptian Joseph are now referred to only interms of characteristic personal “habits,” the Rachel-like narrowing ofhis eyes, and can as such be as easily overcome as they were adopted.

Although Joseph’s notable refinement is put down explicitly to thepositive influence of his new environment—“Dazu aber kam, als Werkder Landeskultur, eine Verfeinerung seines Äußeren” (GW 5: 1018)—onoccasion of its next lengthy analysis, Joseph’s Egyptian beauty, his“Schönheit [. . .] in ihrer ägyptischen Zustutzung” (GW 5: 1097), has be-

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come entirely impeccable. Instead of his face and features, hereJoseph’s Egyptian dress is carefully examined—his head-shawl, hiswig, his collar and arm-rings of enamel, his twofold apron—while theone specific facial detail that is mentioned no longer conforms to the“original.” One of his former, particularly prominent disfigurements hassomehow disappeared, for now Joseph’s ears are explicitly referred toas “klein” (GW 5: 1097).

A few pages earlier we read how this could come about:

Die Lüfte und Säfte Ägyptens näherten ihn, er aß Keme’s Speise, dasWasser des Landes tränkte und schwellte die Zellen seines Körpers, undseine Sonne durchstrahlte sie; er kleidete sich in die Leinwand seinesFlachses, wandelte auf seinem Boden, der seine alten Kräfte und stillenFormgesinnungen in ihm hinaufsandte, nahm lebendig Tag für Tag mitden Augen die von Menschenhand dargestellten Verwirklichungen undAusprägungen dieser still entschiedenen und alles bindenden Grund-gesinnung auf und sprach die Sprache des Landes, die seine Zunge, seineLippen und Kiefer anders stellte, als sie gestellt gewesen waren, so daßbald schon Jaakob, der Vater, zu ihm gesagt haben würde: “Damu, meinReis, was ist mit deinem Munde? Ich kenne ihn nicht mehr.” (GW 5: 963)

Hence, looking back, the subheading of the chapter in which Joseph“becomes visibly an Egyptian”—“Joseph wird zusehends zumÄgypter” (GW 5: 959–77)—might well be taken literally, as the nar-rator seems to insist that we picture this progressive act of assimila-tion not least as a physical process. In the light of his anatomicalanalysis, we can almost watch Joseph becoming an Egyptian in athoroughly “material” sense of the term. The narrator does not hes-itate to compare this exchange of corporal “material” to the processof decay: “Einige Jahre noch, und von dem Stoffe des Joseph, denJaakob-Rebekka zum Abschied umarmte, wird gar nichts mehrübrig sein – so wenig, wie wenn der Tod sein Fleisch aufgelöst hätte”(GW 5: 962). From the water within his cells and the “material” ofhis body to the position of his tongue, lips, and jaw, Joseph willful-ly, actively, and indeed literally “takes in” his new environment and“assimilates” it.

This specific arrangement is particularly delicate for a text whoseown material and central theme is that of equation and equality andthe restoration of sameness after a minor period of difference. Forhere we are shown how it is done. By making exclusive use of the “airsand juices of Egypt,” of “Keme’s food” and “the water of her rivers,”by “speaking her speech,” that is, by denying and refuting his own cul-

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tural identity entirely, the young Canaanite is able to readjust his orig-inally “different” body and his originally “different” (and as we knowfrom the beginning, originally only half handsome) features, makingthem “the same” in order to “pass.” Cultural differences—food andlanguage—are transposed into the parameters of biology and then exposed as natural differences of the body; hence, body and face ofthe immigrant become not only the platform, but also the indicator, ofhis or her readiness to assimilate, that is, to refute and dissolve his orher “Otherness” actively and entirely. The position of tongue, lips, andjaw turns into a measure-mark for the process of subjection to theLeitkultur of the land. In this constellation, both assimilation and theensuing hospitality correspond to the dissolution of the “Other” by“the Other,” and thus, whichever way we look at it, the strangers mustdo it themselves. They may only then be equal, when they have ac-tively endeavored to become “the same.”

The observation that the applied aesthetic register showing the hero“faulty” at first, but “correct” and “durchaus richtig gebildet[]” (GW 5:1097) in the end, cannot be attributed to the “dark Arabian” taste ofJoseph’s time and place but must be evaluated as an anti-Semitic un-dercurrent in the text, and is reinforced by a closer look at the otherfigures of the novel, who do not belong to the inner circle of Israel.

At first, it seems as if Israel’s neighbors were characterized by thesame features as the ancient Jews. The Ismaelites who bring Josephto Egypt have the same “thick” and protruding lips,43 at times even“prominent eyes” (“vorquellende[] Augen” [GW 4: 591])44 and thick,curly hair (“krauses Haar” [ibid.]), which is most probably not onlydue to the fact that they belong to the wild Ismael branch of the fam-ily. The son of the Egyptian King Mirê, whom Joseph sets eyes on inMempi, is also portrayed as “fleischig von Nase und Lippen” (GW 4:751), and even the features of the Pharaoh himself look (and sound)similar to those of his Hebrew interpreter of dreams. Pharaoh’s “nar-row” nose with its “rather depressed bridge” renders his “broad, sen-sitive nostrils”45 all the more noticeable, while his lips are “full” (GW5: 1414). Dark, dense eyebrows return in the face of Mai-Sachme,where they are matched by an ever-growing beard constantly black-ening his cheeks (cf. GW 5: 1307), seeming like a belated echo ofSiegmund Aarenhold’s efforts to “cleanse” himself from his vastgrowth of hair in Mann’s early novella Wälsungenblut (1905). EvenAsnath, Joseph’s Egyptian Mädchen, shows familiar features that aresaid to be “typisch-ägyptisch[].” “Noch waren die Wangen kindlich

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voll, voll auch die Lippen [. . .], das Näschen allenfalls etwas zu flei-schig” (GW 5: 1517). So obviously, not only Joseph, his Jewish broth-ers, and his father are “dark Arabian” in body and face in this latereenactment of their stories.

But the aesthetic register of the novel makes the same subtle dif-ference between “Jews” and other “Semites,” as did the anti-Semiticdiscourse at the time of its composition, despite its imprecise termi-nology.46 For Joseph of Canaan can only become an Egyptian zusehends by “Physiognomie und Gebärde” if his original “featuresand demeanor” are not identical to those at the target of his assimila-tion process, as indeed his somatic metamorphosis indicates. Despitecertain correspondences on the level of imagery, the novel also establishes a definite opposition between the Israelites and the Egyp-tians. While Joseph has always shown a remarkable affinity to Egyp-tian build, with his horizontal and uplifted shoulders (cf. GW 4: 62), hefinally becomes not only “beautiful” (schön), but “right indeed”(durchaus richtig). By feeding on the “Lüfte und Säfte Ägyptens,” theCanaanite Jew manages—literally—to “outgrow” the physical her-itage of his people, while the Joseph in the book succeeds in shiftinghis own imagery in accordance with the novels’ implicit aesthetics. Soeven the fact that the hero has always physically—“Gott wußte woher”(GW 5: 963)—seemed strangely akin to the Egyptians, with his slimlimbs and horizontal shoulders (a characteristic we are already ex-plicitly referred to on our very first encounter), admits of the conclu-sion. All of this is noteworthy, as quite different bodily appearancesare to be expected in the realm of his origin.

Eventually, Joseph is not only uplifted in Egypt but also in becomingan Egyptian, which seems not least aesthetically desirable. Here again,the bipolar structure of the novel surfaces. It is revealed not only in theopposition between the “old” world of “the father,” his God, his Ur-Kunde,and the “new” sphere of “the son,” his Egyptian Erlaubnisse (cf. GW 5:1482–1536), his universal God, and complete cultural assimilation, butnow also even emerges in terms of body, beauty, and biology.

And then there is another substantial difference between the “beneIsrael” and their future hosts running literally just underneath the levelof “body imagery.” Not only for Jaakob and Joseph, but also fromAbraham to Ephraim and Manasse, “blood” is persistently attached tothe Jewish population of the novel, partly to account for somatic, butmostly to account for entirely non-somatic differences, that is, for thecultural and spiritual differences of this “family.” As most things, this

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can already be detected on the Höllenfahrt, where Israel’s fate and Is-rael’s blood are already subtly linked. Not only are certainSchicksalsentwicklungen said to be preparing themselves dunkelan-fänglich in Abraham’s blood (cf. GW 4: 12), but we are also remindedof this rather awkward constellation roughly thirty pages later, whenyoung Joseph is still supposed to be guarding these as a “heritage” inhis blood (cf. GW 4: 49). Even Jaakob’s stubbornness, of whichJoseph repeatedly reminds himself when tempted in Egypt, takes onthe semantically absurd form of “mute” and somehow blood-relatedresolutions, although they are not in any way “bloody” by content, norcould Jaakob’s verdicts on Egypt really run in the blood of his family;they simply warn the young stranger not to be too impressed by thewonders of Egypt and certainly not to admire the cultural magnificenceof the civilization awaiting him. Consequently, Joseph’s first overtbreak with the strict principles of his father takes place nowhere elsethan in his “young blood,” which begins to surge at his first glimpse ofthe sphinx (cf. GW 4: 744). And all of Joseph’s subsequent attemptsat emancipation from the law of the father are also in some way boundto biology, suggesting that “blood,” “belief,” and “behavior” are inextri-cable entities. Even when Joseph gradually begins to look on Egyptiancult and culture with increasing pleasure, he still has his reservationsand can only do so “vorbehaltlich des stillen Bewußtseins in [s]einemBlut, daß es das Eigentlichste und Wichtigste wohl nicht sein mag”(GW 4: 853).

The suggestive blending of blood, body, belief, and behavior in Israel is supplemented by the traditional idea of the Israelite covenantas a particularly “bloody” affair, of which the bloody “sacrifice” of cir-cumcision alone is supposed to bear ample witness. While the sameprocedure in Egypt is regarded as a mere custom (äußerliche Gepflo-genheit), in Joseph’s family it has taken on an altogether differentmeaning.

Man muß bedenken, daß die als äußerliche Gepflogenheit aus Ägypter-reich übernommene Sitte der Beschneidung in Josephs Sippe und Kreisvon langer Hand her eine besondere mystische Bedeutung gewonnenhatte. [. . .] Das blutige Opfer der Beschneidung nähert sich in der Ideeder Entmannung noch mehr als körperlich. (GW 4: 79–80)

The same applies to the passionate jealousy of Jaakob’s God, withwhom he watches over the covenant of his people. Joseph draws par-allels to what has been bestowed on him in “Blut und Gedächtnis”(GW 4: 877), and so he seals the close but diffuse connection between

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the God of his fathers and the sphere of “blood” yet again, a connec-tion that has played an ever-shifting and yet always central role in thehistory of anti-Semitism.47

Even when Joseph has already succumbed to the customs of Kemeand eventually forgotten his father’s strict verdicts altogether, even whenJoseph himself has begun not only to look, but even to act like anEgyptian through and through, his spiritual heritage is incessantly relat-ed to his special “blood.” In view of the originally forbidden Egyptianrituals, he even draws his composure from the “geistliche[] Ironie seinesBlutes,” that is, again from the same hybrid combination of the spiritu-al and the corporal. And finally, even Joseph’s proverbial chastity isnothing but heritage of the blood.

So war die besagte und besungene Keuschheit Josephs [. . .] keine grund-sätzliche Verneinung des Liebes- und Zeugungsgebietes [. . .]; sondern siewar nur das Erbgut seines Blutes, diesem Gebiete die Gottesvernunft zuwahren (GW 5: 1143),

so yet again, nothing but the result of a certain religious “Otherness”running in his veins.

Hence, as opposed to the other families of the novel, the stories ofJaakob’s family always seem to refer to their specific bond between bi-ology and belief, their god and their genes, so to speak, by which most,if not all, of their differences can not only be explained, but also, asJoseph in Egypt demonstrates, by way of blood-exchange even entirelyovercome.

It is therefore only coherent that blood should shift back into thecenter of attention in the fourth and last volume of the novel, as thefocus of narration returns to Jaakob and his sons after their lengthyabsence from the story. In the intervening episode of Thamar, the spe-cific “Blutseinheit des geistlichen Stammes” (GW 5: 1540, 1541) isnot only mentioned again, but, as we have seen, again related toJaakob’s obstinately upheld personal illusions. By letting Jaakob de-fend his absurd beliefs about the blood of his kin, the novel passes theresponsibility for this delicate combination elegantly on to the figuresit narrates, notably to the most important representative of the “old”sphere. And so, when Jaakob and his sons have finally reachedEgypt, again blood abounds. Joseph is a Bruderblut (GW 5: 1601,1618), his sons only Halbblut (GW 5: 1519, 1656), while Benjamin istemporarily thought of as Diebesblut (GW 5: 1674) and Levi’s de-scendants as Leviblut (GW 5: 1797), and even Serach, the singingprophetess, has obviously inherited some special “blood” that makes

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her sing (cf. GW 5: 1703).48 By contrast, throughout the extensiveEgyptian volumes of the novel, we learn nothing of Mai Sachme’s,Mont-Kaw’s, or Pharaoh’s blood, and even Mut-em-enet only bleeds ina comparatively literal sense when she cuts her fingers in blind infat-uation (cf. GW 5: 1208–27).

So apparently, within the blood passages of the Joseph novels, a remarkable overlapping of the spheres takes place. On the one hand,the semantically often absurd, often diffusely magic or mystical allu-sions to blood and its compounds follow all too closely in the footstepsof anti-Semitic patterns that claim an intimate relationship betweenblood and blood-thirst, and then later between biology and Judaism.Within the novel itself, references to Israel’s “blood” often serve as explanations not only for the Israelites’ biological, but also for their religious or cultural, difference—Abraham’s search for God, Jaakob’sloathing at iconolatry, the covenant between God and his people,Joseph’s chastity and Gottesvernunft. The blood passages mark thefuzzy, yet altogether insurmountable, differences between the childrenof Jaakob and the rest that solely and miraculously Joseph succeedsin leaving behind entirely. That these specific differences of the Houseof Jaakob all stand in some subcutaneous relation to their specialblood can also be read from the lasting—or, as in Joseph’s case, notquite so lasting—marks this blood leaves on Israel’s bodies and faces,not only on Joseph’s.49

Eventually, the “dark Arabian,” that is, “Semitic” register, ironicallyrecommended to us in the beginning, has emerged as an anti-Semiticset of aesthetics underlying the text. Could Joseph allegedly be regarded as “beautiful” only by the taste of his time? At first, the explicit list of limitations to his “beauty” subtly shifts both the imageryand its commentary toward traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes—aregister whose specific applicability to Jews is reinforced by the moreor less subtle difference the novels make between the Israelites andother “Semites.”

As we have seen, only Joseph can surpass the blood boundary thatMann’s novel reerects. He alone is able to adjust, that is, correct, theposition of his tongue, mouth, and jaw by strictly abstaining from hismother tongue. His “faulty,” “Semitic” features disappear, so that heeventually appears “beautiful” to every, not only the “dark Arabian,”taste and aesthetic. The novel also shows us how this is done, sinceblood-exchange is the apparent precondition.

In the end, all self-imposed, and now also self-surmounted, “differ-

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ence” has been eliminated from the world of the novel, and the roadto its happy end is clear. The “bene Israel,” once again the paradigmof “the Other,” have been restored to the universal sphere of mankind,wherever they themselves had chosen to go astray—and not whereothers had excluded them from counting as equal. So in the end, wecould say that this Judenbuch has turned into a universal Mensch-heitsbuch after all, whose explicit “beauty” of its closing sentence de-rives exactly from this reinstallation of “sameness.”

More interesting by far than the question of what kind of book Manninitially intended to write or not write might in the end be this: The repre-sentation of “difference,” “Otherness,” and the quest for their dissolution,once more the “essential other of the Christian west,”50 that is, the par-ticular history of the Jewish people, seems to have lent itself almost irre-sistibly well. There must have been more behind the choice of exactlythese stories of all “myths” than simply the wish to disown the fascists,for the renarration of this immanently Jewish tale as a universal story ofprogressive humanity simultaneously performs another act of expropri-ation. The leveling of “Jewish” “difference” yet again serves as an example for the leveling of all kinds of “difference” that stand in the wayof universal humanity and “humaneness.” Hence, Joseph und seineBrüder eventually does move into line with the long and fateful history ofJudaeophobia. In its deep-rooted entanglements with traditions of think-ing and believing in the “Christian west,” literary anti-Semitism may, asis the case here, even surface where the author did not intend it andwhere for a long time his readers and scholars refused to detect it.

Institut für Germanistik

NOTES

1. For exceptions from this rule, cf. Drave, Levenson, and Small. AlthoughSmall is the only scholar to have cast a critical eye on the question of “Jewish-ness” in Joseph, her illuminating study has simply been ignored so far.

2. Thomas Mann to Eduard Jedidjah Chavkin, Mann, Selbstkommentare102 [9/8/1934; hereafter cited as SK, with further references also appearingin the text]; Thomas Mann to Ernst Bertram, SK 116 [14/6/1935]: “Der‘Joseph’ ist kein Judenbuch, wenn es das ist, was Sie grämt, sondern einMenschheitsbuch.”

3. Mann, Gesammelte Werke 13: 199–206, 205 [hereafter cited as GW inthe annotations, with further references also appearing in the text]. The essaynow carries the slightly more humble title “Vom Buch der Bücher undJoseph.”

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4. Cf. Thomas Mann to Karl Kerényi, SK 192 [18/2/1941]; Mann, “Leidenan Deutschland. Tagebuchblätter aus den Jahren 1933 und 1934,” GW 12:684–766, 732.

5. “Es haben die heiligen Schriften der Kirche, besonders die hebräischenSchriften, das Volk Israel als ihren Hauptdarsteller. Dieses Volk war nicht nurTräger und Autor dieser Bücher. Diese Schriften zu lesen bedeutet vielmehr,von diesem Volk zu lesen, davon, was es sagte und was es tat und was ihmwiderfuhr,” van Buren, Eine Theologie 1, 50.

6. Heine 43; Assmann 214; cf. Crüsemann 63–79. 7. Thomas Mann to Karl Kerényi, SK 192–93 [18/2/1941]: “[. . .] – und was

sollte mein Element derzeit wohl sein als Mythos plus Psychologie [. . .], denntatsächlich ist Psychologie das Mittel, den Mythos den fascistischenDunkelmännern aus den Händen zu nehmen und ihn ins Humane ‘umzufunk-tionieren’”; cf. GW 11: 658; cf. Thomas Mann to Harry Slochower, SK 218–20[19/6/1942]; cf. Thomas Mann to Udo Rukser, SK 303 [1/3/1947].

8. Cf. Poliakov 2: 116–18.9. Cf. Neumann 128, annotation 61: “Daß die Geschichte um Abraham,

Isaak, Jaakob und Joseph zunächst und zuerst eine alte Judengeschichte ist,sollte im zeitgeschichtlichen Kontext nicht übersehen werden. Thomas Mannhat daran nicht gedacht, als er seinen Roman konzipierte; aufmerksamgeworden, akzeptierte er die Koinzidenz als sinnige Fügung, soweit darübernicht das universal-humanistische Telos des Unternehmens aus den Augengeriet.”

10. “Aber gegen die oppositionelle Rolle, in die der Roman ungewollt undunverhofft hineingewachsen ist, habe ich nicht das Geringste einzuwenden,und gern lasse ich die jüdischen Leser als seine kompetentesten Beurteilergelten,” Thomas Mann to Eduard Jedidjah Chavkin, SK 102 [9/8/1934]; cf.Guthke.

11. Cf. Strobel 331–32: “Ob der freilich nicht zu unterschätzende Antise-mitismus negatives Korrelat einer möglicherweise implizit bleibenden Volks-tumsideologie sei, darf angesichts des Joseph wie auch der Moses-Novellebezweifelt werden.” Cf. Sprecher 66: “Wer aber – wie Thomas Mann im‘Joseph’ – die Entwicklung des Volkes Israel als exemplarisch für den Werde-gang des humanen Menschen vorführt, [. . .] bei dem reichen ein paar Figurenaus dem Frühwerk nicht für das pauschale Nachgeborenenverdikt ‘antisemi-tisch.’” Cf. Schneider 36: “Eine eindrucksvolle Koinzidenz: Während die Nazisdie Juden aus der Geschichte streichen wollten, versenkte sich der angese-henste Schriftsteller Deutschlands in die Welt des Alten Testaments und ver-lebendigte sie mit den Mitteln des modernen Romans.” Without explicit refer-ence to Joseph, Kurzke sums up the sensus communis of scholarship asregards the possibility of Mann or even of only his works being anti-Semitic:“In unseren Tagen aber wird Thomas Mann immer häufiger eines zumindestunterschwelligen Antisemitismus bezichtigt. [. . .] Thomas Mann aber hat sichentschieden, und zwar projüdisch. [. . .] Da er selbst ein Außenseiter war,empfand er die Juden schon früh als Brüder. [. . .] Also ein Philosemit. [. . .]Was es an ‘Stellen’ gibt, hat stets einen besonderen Kontext und darf nichteinfach zum Generellen hochgerechnet werden” (209–11).

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12. Cf. Almog, Anti-Semitism through the Ages.13. For a critical review of “thematology” (Motivgeschichte) as the most

common method of analysis in research on literary anti-Semitism, cf. Körte. 14. “Joseph für sein Teil erblickte in einer südbabylonischen Stadt namens

Uru [. . .] den Anfang aller, das heißt: seiner persönlichen Dinge,” GW 4: 11.15. For the specific Art of Biblical Narrative, cf. Alter’s study carrying this

title.16. McConnell 6; emphasis in the original.17. van Buren, “On Reading Someone Else’s Mail” 595–606.18. For the upheaved history of the “Arbeitsgemeinschaft,” cf. Kammerer.19. Levenson 171.20. “Blood,” its compounds and derivatives in more or less explicit connec-

tion with the Israelites, appears roughly forty times in Mann’s approximatelyseventy-page-long novella Das Gesetz; cf. GW 8: 808–76.

21. Thomas Mann not only studied Alfred Jeremias’ Das Alte Testament imLichte des Alten Orient while working on Joseph but also published a reviewon Jeremias’ Handbuch der altorientalischen Geisteskultur, for which hefound the heading “Einheit des Menschengeistes”; cf. GW 10: 751–56.

22. Cf. GW 4: 817, 818; 5: 961, 1250, 1719. Mann seems to have taken thisimage and phrase from the collection of Midrashim he found in bin Gurion.Despite its Jewish source, the way in which the image (and even more so theword) is applied to “the father” in Joseph evokes reminiscences of the oldChristian images of “Jewish stubbornness,” “obstinacy,” and “blindness” to-ward Christianity and its widespread belief in the “fulfillment” of the biblicalpromises made to the Jewish people—one of the many connotations that arelost in Helen Lowe-Porter’s translation of Joseph into English [hereafter citedas Lowe-Porter], where she phrases “refractory cow”; cf. Lowe-Porter 550.

23. Graf 226.24. Hülshörster 243.25. Before he arrives in Egypt, Jaakob even rejects the cultural concept of

sitting on chairs (cf. GW 4: 97), never mind the art of astronomy or magic ofSinear; cf. GW 4: 10. He detests the city, with its hustle and bustle (“Geschreiund Getümmel” [GW 4: 250]) and its boastful exaggerations and imitations ofthe Eternal (“Prahlerei übertriebener Baulichkeiten, die sich die Miene desEwigen gaben” [ibid.]). Not only does Jaakob refute all forms of “Bild-macherei” (GW 4: 853—“picture-making,” as Lowe-Porter [573] translates lit-erally), as we might have been prepared for, but even the phenomenon of lit-eracy is subject to Jaakob’s severe criticism, especially since it is hopelesslyoverestimated in the “schlammige Land dort unten” (GW 4: 414). “The father”is also firmly opposed to profane singing and music-making—an objectioncast into a German pun that makes use of the phonetic proximity of Lied andLiederlichkeit: “Liederwesen ist leider nicht ferne der Liederlichkeit” (GW 5:1712). Lowe-Porter (1133) plays with equivalent English puns brilliantly here,when she translates: “Sense and senses lie close together, and song rhymesall too easily with wrong; grace and charm are prone to gracelessness andharm.” Even at the news of Joseph’s resurrection, Jaakob shows an almostallergic reaction to the insinuation of ambivalence: “Wagt ihr es, mir zu kom-

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men mit solcher Schwächlichkeit und Israel zuzumuten das Halb-und-Halbe?Wo wären wir und wo wäre Gott, hätten wir je uns abspeisen lassen mit demAllenfallsigen? Die Wahrheit ist eine und ist unteilbar” (GW 5: 1716). On hisarrival in Egypt, we then suddenly find Jaakob sitting on chairs (cf. GW 5:1747, 1775) and professing the charms of ambiguity: “[. . .] und was ist süßerals das Doppelte, Schwankende? Ich weiß wohl, daß das Doppelte nicht desGeistes ist, für den wir stehen, sondern ist Völkernarrheit. Und doch erlag ichseinem urmächtigen Zauber” (GW 5: 1803).

26. “Unterschieden sich doch auch die Formen, in denen Israel unter demBaum dem Gott der Ewigkeiten huldigte, fast nicht von den Kultbräuchen derKinder Kanaans – mit Ausnahme alles Unfugs, versteht sich, und anstößigerScherze [. . .]” (GW 5: 1732).

27. By translating the subheading “Joseph schließt einen Bund” (GW 4:898–903) as “Joseph Makes a Pact,” Lowe-Porter erases the specific religious allusions this phrase always carries, not only in the Joseph novels; the “neueBund” always has to do with the “alte Bund” that it is posited against, so thatmaybe the terms “new testament” or “covenant” would have been a little closerto the German original in their stretch of meaning.

28. Lowe-Porter (969) takes refuge in the—slightly changed!—opening lineof the Lord’s Prayer to make the difference between “my Father above” and“My father who art in heaven” (emphasis added).

29. Lowe-Porter (638) translates “Physiognomie und Gebärde” as “form andmanner,” a translation in which the somatic dimensions of Joseph’s assimila-tion that the German phrase already implies and that the text then proceeds tospell out in detail are erased; therefore, I suggest “features and demeanor.”

30. Here, Lowe-Porter’s translation points to “different” aesthetics in mattersof somatic “beauty” as the topic of this passage quite directly: “But to sym-pathize on aesthetic grounds we must adjust ourselves to the dark Arabiantaste then and there current, and certainly from that point of view the youthmust have been so beautiful, and so well-favored, that at first glance he couldreally have been taken for a god” (Lowe-Porter 38).

31. Small (78) suggests a similar reading of this passage.32. Thus, Lowe-Porter’s very fitting translation of the first lines of the fol-

lowing passage: “[. . .] the face of the youthful moon-worshipper by the wellwas lovely even in its defects” (Lowe-Porter 38–39).

33. Lowe-Porter (39) loses the more negative connotation and the vaguereminiscence of school days in rügen in translating “censure.”

34. Cf. Elsaghe 124–35.35. Here again, I would suggest departure from Lowe-Porter’s translation, as

the animal-like undercurrent in black, thick, and heavy hair that falls beutelar-tig is erased in hair that falls “like a bag in the neck behind” (Lowe-Porter 39).

36. Interestingly, the connotations of this passage shift considerably in Lowe-Porter’s translation. It not only leaves out the rather significant offenbar, whichintroduces the dubious explanation for the shape and size of Joseph’s ears andthus already hints at their insufficiency, but also leaves out any reference to theGerman ausgeartet as an underlying allusion to a different explanation forthese specific features, by simply stating: “[. . .]—and with the ears all would

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have been well, but that the lobes had been made rather long and fleshy by thesilver rings worn since early childhood” (39).

37. Cf. Hau and Ash 19.38. Günther 219. 39. Günther 211.40. Günther 219.41. Günther 218: “Im jüdischen Volk scheinen auch fleischige ‘Ohrmuscheln’

häufiger zu sein, überhaupt – besonders beim männlichen Geschlecht – verhält-nismäßig große Ohren.” Big ears as a supposed atavism also play a prominentrole in criminal anthropology, a discipline widely recognized at the turn of thecentury. Here, too, large ears are read as physical marks of relapse into earlierstages of human development, both of the criminal and of the Jew: “The phys-iognomy of the Jew was, in turn, closely related to that of the insane and habit-ual criminals, in the latter case especially through the large ears, which accord-ing to criminologists like Cesare Lombroso, at the end of the nineteenth century,were supposed to be the criminal’s trademark. [. . .] Habitual criminals were saidto be a throwback supposedly to more primitive times and large ears gave themaway—this in contrast to the small and well-formed ears of Greek manhood”(Mosse 66–72).

42. Lowe-Porter 861.43. The German term wulstlippig, which appears in all these passages, is

almost as stereotyped for “Semitic” features as the “image” it describes; cf.GW 4: 586, 588, 667, 779. Lowe-Porter phrases “thick lips” or “thick-lipped”every time, by which she stays with the same word but does not (as she can-not) transmit the German connotations; cf. Lowe-Porter 392, 393, 449, 524.

44. For the significance of “overflowing” “Jewish” bodies with “protruding”features (not only) in the works of Mann, cf. Elsaghe 140–41.

45. The negative connotation of the animal-associated adjective witternd,which reappears in the clearly negative portrait of the fascist Jew ChaimBreisacher in Doktor Faustus (1947), when he is attributed a “witternde Füh-lung mit der geistigen Bewegung der Zeit, seine Nase für ihre neuesten Wil-lensmeinungen habe ich [Zeitblom] nie geleugnet” (GW 6: 371), is replacedin Lowe-Porter’s translation by the clearly more positive connotations of“sensitive.”

46. The term “anti-Semitism” derives from the term “Semitism,” which wasprobably coined in 1771 by A. L. Schlözer “im Anschluß an die Völkertafel inGen 10” and introduced into philology only a few years later by J. G. Eichhornfor “‘Semiten’ bzw. ‘semitische Stämme’ als Träger der ‘semitischen’ Sprache.Die neuen Begriffe bürgerten sich in der Sprachwissenschaft rasch ein und fan-den trotz naheliegender Einwände – die ‘semitische’ Sprachfamilie und die alsNachkommen Sems genannten Völker sind keineswegs identisch – Eingang indie Volkskunde [. . .]. Gobineau hat dann durch den entschiedenen und termi-nologisch fixierten Gebrauch des Begriffs ‘Rasse’ die linguistisch-ethnologischenBegriffe naturalistisch fundiert, aus dem geschichtlichen Volkscharakter wurdeein Rassencharakter” (Nipperdey 114).

47. Cf. von Braun; Rohrbacher and Schmidt 131–36; Trachtenberg 140–55;Almog, Nationalism and Anti-Semitism 62–66.

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48. In the English translation, the term “blood” does not reappear in all theabovementioned cases; for example, Serach only has something “in her ofIsaac’s wild and beautiful half-brother” (Lowe-Porter 1127), and Joseph’ssons are referred to not as “half-blood,” but as “half-breed” (Lowe-Porter1096).

49. I have elaborated on the brothers’ features in my comparison of Mann’sJoseph und seine Brüder and Robert Musil’s Mann ohne Eigenschaften.

50. Gilman and Katz 2.

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