Cowboy Bebop: Is Spike Spiegel Jewish In The Anime?
Spike Spiegel, one of the protagonists in Cowboy Bebop, has a mysterious past, but his ethnic background is just as ambiguous. While Cowboy Bebop is set in a futuristic, largely racially ambiguous neo-noir landscape, audiences over the years have consistently interpreted Spike as being a character of Jewish descent. If this is the case, Cowboy Bebop's Spike Spiegel is not only a rare instance of a Jewish protagonist in fiction but also one who defies typical stereotypes.
Jewish identity can be based on ethnicity or religion, and while Spike is most likely not a religious character, he could be Jewish by ethnicity. Spike’s hair and skin tone suggest that he’s of Levantine heritage, and his surname, Spiegel, is common among Ashkenazi Jews, who are a Jewish diaspora group. Even Spike’s English voice actor, Steve Blum, is Jewish, making it reasonable to infer that Spike Spiegel is as well when combining all of these elements.
Related: How Cowboy Bebop’s First Episode Secretly Has A Major Villain Reveal
YetCowboy Bebop’s co-creators have never been too concerned with Spike Spiegel’s ethnic background. Although Spike’s appearance is modeled after Yūsaku Matsuda's character in Tantei Monogatari, Shinichirō Watanabe gave a noncommittal “sure, why not” when asked directly if Spike Spiegel is Jewish. What this ultimately means is that Spike’s ethnic background isn’t particularly important to Cowboy Bebop’s creators and is up for interpretation on the viewers’ parts. If one interprets Spike Spiegel as Jewish, however, he becomes a rare and refreshing instance of a Jewish protagonist in genre fiction who isn’t depicted as embodying harmful stereotypes, as is often the case.
In this way, Spike Spiegel’s seemingly Jewish identity in
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