The German author Thomas Mann, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929, was a vocal and public opponent of the Nazis for many reasons, their anti-Semitism among them. But he also exhibited a philo-Semitism that went far beyond an aversion to the vicious persecution of the Jews. As Shalom Goldman explains, Mann’s respect for the Jewish people became manifest while he was researching his epic retelling of the biblical story of Joseph and his brothers:
Like many others educated in the yeshiva tradition, I delighted in Mann’s use of midrashim, the [rabbinic] legends that supplement the spare narratives of the Bible. Mann accessed these legends through his own research, and through a network of European Jewish scholars he cultivated before he set to work on what would eventually be his four-volume, 1,500-page magnum opus on Joseph.
In 1930, Mann and his wife visited the Near East, where the novelist sought further inspiration:
[I]n British Mandate Palestine Mann and his wife placed an important concern on their itinerary—Zionism. The Manns visited Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and a kibbutz, and were interviewed by the local English-language paper, The Palestine Bulletin. In the interview Mann emphasized his support for Zionism, and at the same time called for recognition of the rights of the Arabs of Palestine. As Mann’s biographer Donald Prater put it, the novelist found the visit to Palestine “of inestimable value for the background he needed. But he was alive too to the modern situation of Palestine and of the immense achievements of the Jewish settlers.”
A few years before this visit Mann expressed his sympathy for Zionism in a letter to the German Palestine Committee. “I can only say that one need not be a Zionist nor even a Jew to find the idea of awakening the land from its barren state, where such a tremendous evolution in the history of mankind has taken place from the days of the exiled people.”
Goldman finds himself surprised and disappointed that the writer Colm Toibin omits all of this from his recent novel about Mann’s life, focusing almost single-mindedly on what “Toibin considers the most important fact about him, that he was gay.” Thus, to Toibin, Mann’s Death in Venice, in which a man’s obsession with a teenage boy is central to the plot, is his most important novel. And in “Toibin’s retelling of Mann’s life, his tip to Venice as a young man is the only important journey.”
But perhaps Goldman shouldn’t be so surprised. To the people who write influential reviews of serious fiction, the story of a gay man living in an age of repression is a sympathetic one. The story of a Bible-reading Zionist, less so.
Read more on Fathom: https://fathomjournal.org/thomas-manns-philo-semitism-and-colm-toibins-thomas-mann/