Buckle in kids, this is going to be a long fucking answer. (Please read this in a light-hearted and educational tone, because people on the internet always seem to sound mad and I’m not mad, it’s just this is one of those Things I like to info dump on.)
TO START OFF, there are two things about this question that are not technically relevant to how I write/conceive of fictional!Brad Colbert. This is 100% a me thing not an everyone thing.
1) I don’t really care if Real Brad identifies as Jewish or not. And that’s actually more of an if then you might think! I also checked Wikipedia and the only thing it literally says is that Colbert “was adopted into a Jewish family” and “is not religious.” (I’ll go more into depth about why this is inconclusive later.)
HOWEVER, nowhere does it state that he does not identify as Jewish, and of the three sources for that statement, two are about his combat stress work and the first links to a 404 page, so if it discusses his family life, I can’t tell what he actually said. But in any case, I am not writing RPF of real Brad Colbert, I am writing doc of Brad Colbert as played by Alexander Skarsgard. I’ve actually avoided reading supplementary sources on the guys so that I can maintain that distinction.
2) Also, whether show-Brad is an atheist is… kind of up for debate? I’ve had this conversation about Erik Lehnsherr, too. To be honest, I am hugely biased towards fictional portrayals of religious Jews because I am a religious Jew, and I will occasionally write them in fanfic even if the canon evidence is shaky at best. But in any case, when you look at what Brad says, it’s not NECESSARILY conclusive in favor of the atheist argument. If you find it persuasive I totally get it, but because of my personal bias I don’t and that’s also cool.
I think there’s no question that Brad is anti-chaplain, for sure, but his statements about G-d and religion are slightly more joking in tone, and if we took everything these guys said on that show at face value, they would all be terrible people. It’s possible that Brad doesn’t like organized religion, but believes in G-d in a vague sort of way. It’s possible he doesn’t believe in G-d, but observes some Jewish rituals because they were part of how he grew up. Real people feel that way, and Brad could too.
Also um… “No mention of him being Jewish” is pretty concretely untrue. Ray refers to Brad as a Hebrew twice, and Brad says he was raised with “Talmudic tradition.” The Talmud is a book of Jewish law. After the Torah and the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud is THE book of Jewish law. So the show ascribes some sort of Jewish identity to him, if not necessarily a religious one.
Now it’s time for “Jewish Identity 101.”
Anon, I’m just going to go ahead and guess that you live in a Christian-normative society, because basically most people on tumblr do. If you live in the Americas or most European countries, that’s probably the case. (My following argument might also apply if you live in an Islam-normative society but I’m less certain about that so I’ll stick to what I know.) That means that you are familiar with split “religious” and “ethnic” identities. Modern Christians are 99.9% NOT descended from the Christians who lived two thousand years ago; they or their ancestors converted to Christianity at some point. If they took a blood test, their results could say “Souther Italian” or “Spanish and Indigenous to South America,” but “Christian” would not be an option. And because the Christian population is so huge and widespread, different groups might have absolutely nothing in common with each other except their faith. Different forms of Christian identity developed independently from each other.
And when most atheists leave the Christian faith, they cease to identify as Christian. There are exceptions to this, most notably among Catholics, but Christian doctrine teaches that belief in Jesus is mandatory, and ex-Christian atheists can engage with their ethnic heritage without thinking of it as explicitly Christian. Pretzels and beer are German foods, not Christian ones.
Jewishness is an ethnoreligious identity. You see, Judaism has never sought out converts en masse the way that Christianity and Islam have. We have no concrete evidence that Jews have ever conquered a country and said “okay you filthy pagans, become Jewish or we’ll kill you all.” Instead, Judaism has largely been passed down through familial bonds. Through most of recorded history, Jews have married other Jews and raised their children to be Jews who married other Jews. A majority of Jews living today can prove, through genetic testing, that their ancestors came from the Levant region. A Polish ethnic Jew and an Iraqi ethnic Jew do share common genetic markers.
“But wait!” You’re thinking. “Brad Colbert isn’t ethnically Jewish, so what does it matter?”
Because of the oppression we faced from Christians and Muslims in Christian- and Muslim-majority countries, for huge swaths of our history we have lived in semi-isolated communities, which fostered distinct Jewish cultures. There is such a thing as Jewish food, Jewish music, Jewish philosophy, Jewish art, Jewish history. Depending on where your family is from these things might be different from each other or share similarities to local gentile culture, but Jews have also had super high literacy rates throughout most of our history, so Jews from Morocco could and did write to Jews from Poland, and your average dirt-poor Jew in imperial Russia could and did read works written by the loftiest Spanish Medieval Jewish rabbi. All of this helped foster the inclusivity of the Jewish community. And the fact remains that there are a METRIC FUCKTON of people out there who identify as “culturally Jewish” not because they believe in Jewish theology, but because hey grew up hearing Yiddish in their homes and eating challah and lighting Chanukah candles. These aren’t just religious rituals, they are the cornerstone of cultural and home life.
There are also people who identify as Jewish because they lost family members to anti-Semitic violence and feel that denying their heritage would be a betrayal of that. This is the relevant point in the fic that, I’m assuming, brought you here. No matter how secular a Jew may be, they’re not going to give Nazis or Nazi ideals a pass. Fun fact: there was a huge surge in secular Soviets marking their passports with an “H” for “Hebrew” once they began to hear of Nazi antisemitic violence. They had split from their Jewish heritage in EVERY OTHER WAY, but fuck the Nazis. It’s even possible to be a religious atheist in Judaism. Humanistic Judaism is a non-deity centric denomination, and many people find comfort in the religious rituals and teachings of Judaism even if their conception of a deity is shaky.
Does this make sense? It’s hard to explain. Basically… You don’t need to be religious to be Jewish. We can’t split our religious and secular heritage from each other as easily as Christians can, because secular Jewish culture draws heavily from our religious tradition, our stories, our history. All of this belongs to us as Jews regardless of our opinion towards G-d.
And this is also true for people like Brad Colbert and myself. Converts. When we join the Jewish people, we fucking JOIN THE JEWISH PEOPLE, no take-backsies. That is a stone-cold law; if I were to go out right now and say “whoops changed my mind I want to be Catholic again,” my rabbi wouldn’t say “she was faking the whole time! she was never Jewish, her conversion is invalid!” He would say “she’s a Jewish apostate.” If I changed my mind again I wouldn’t have to convert again, because in the eyes of Jewish law I have been Jewish the whole time. And my conversion studies wasn’t just about reading the Bible, it was about Jewish history and oppression and food, because Jewish identity encompasses all of that and I wouldn’t feel part of the FAMILY if I didn’t know some of it.
This is, like… doubly or triply true for someone like Brad, who was probably adopted at a very very young age. Jewish parents don’t adopt kids and spend their whole lives going “hey we’re Jewish but you’re not, go outside while we usher in the Shabbat because it’s not for you.” They raise their kids as Jews! For him to say “I am not Jewish” would be to essentially say “I have no culture at all,” and guess what? Canon backs me up on this one.
“I was one of those unfortunates adopted by upper middle-class professionals and nurtured in an environment of learning, art and a socio-religious culture steeped in more than 2000 years of Talmudic tradition.”
BOOM. That right there is Brad bragging about being Jewish. And the inclusion of the word “Talmud” makes me inclined to believe that he is, at least in some part, proud of the theological and philosophical contributions of Jews to the world, because that’s pretty much what the Talmud is and someone who is virulently against being associated with the Jewish faith or the Jewish people probably would not have referenced that specific book.
TL;DR Jewish Atheists exist and Brad Colbert is probably one of them. I’d give it a solid “yes” on the Jewish front and a vague “maybe…?” on the Atheist front.
