Mann's work on the four novels The Tales of Jacob, The Young Joseph, Joseph in Egypt and Joseph the Provider spans a phase in his creative career in which the pressure of historical events obliged him to redefine his political attitude, his cultural identity, and his position as a literary author. While this monumental work was emerging, the Weimar Republic collapsed, the Nazis came to power, and Mann went into exile and emigrated to the USA, where he struggled to find a political attitude towards Germany and finally adopted a firm public stance opposed to Hitler. This anti-Nazi stance assumed increasing urgency for the writer with the outbreak of the Second World War. The remarkable persistence with which Mann pursued the Joseph project, however, also shows that he saw it as the great work of his later years.

At first sight, Mann’s choice of biblical material, which as a poeta doctus he links with the mythologies of the ancient world, must seem surprising. The author himself comments to his publisher, Bermann Fischer, on the ‘almost insane discrepancy between the work and our time’. Hence the Joseph tetralogy has been interpreted as an escape from the historical present. Only very recently have scholars sought to treat Mann’s Egypt as a reflection of his own historical experiences.