Was Noah Jewish?

No, of course the biblical Noah was not a Jew. There were no Jews in the world until much later.

Abraham, the first Hebrew came ten generations after Noah. And Moses received divine revelation six generations after that.

According to BBC News the new film "Noah" has been criticized by religious groups.

Regarding the Jewish links to Noah (the film) Eric Goldman, my favorite film critic, wrote about the film's Jewish director Darren Aronofsky in the Jewish Standard, "Noah and the Jews." Here is some of what he says.

...Jewish tradition has a long history of encouraging interpretation of the “p’shat,” the literal text. Mr. Aronofsky and Mr. Handel have done so, drawing from a rich mix of rabbinic literature. In contrast, some Christian and Muslim scholars and clergy have had trouble with the film, because it changes the Noah story’s fixed literal reading. Because of this initial reaction, Paramount, the film’s distributor, has chosen to alter its advertising, now saying that the film was “inspired” by the Bible story.

Mr. Aronofsky was proud to describe his Jewish upbringing and share with us how important it was for him to make this motion picture. As a youth, he had planned to backpack across Europe, beginning in Israel, where he volunteered on a kibbutz. His expectations for helping Israeli agriculture were dashed when he found himself on an assembly line at the kibbutz’s plastic factory. In an online interview on his website, aronofsky.net, he noted, “So I ran away after two days. And if you have no money and you’re walking around the Western Wall in Jerusalem with a backpack, you get brought into religious sects that introduce you to mysticism, that show you the beauty and magic of religion, to bring you back into the fold.”

Mr. Aronofsky was affected by that experience and it found its way into his first narrative film. Text, interpretation, and choice of words are important ingredients in that film, “Pi,” made in 1998, a movie that would garner the young director a variety of awards and national attention. The film was about Max, a “numbers theorist,” who begins to make stock calculations based on his computer’s suggestions. He and his mentor, Sol, struggle with issues of mathematical logic, which only gets more complicated when Lenny introduces new questions related to gematria (a form of mystical mathematics that involves assigning numeric values to Hebrew letters). After “Pi,” Aronofsky made a series of strong, not always popular films, which included “Requiem for a Dream” and “The Fountain.” Most recently, he directed the highly acclaimed “The Wrestler” and “The Black Swan.” “Noah” marked a return to struggling with Jewish text.

“Noah” spends a great deal of time developing the character of the man who was chosen by the Creator to live through the catastrophic flood. Noah was righteous for his time, but as most commentators agree, he was an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Russell Crowe is excellent as Noah; he and Jennifer Connelly, as his wife, Naama, bring us a sense of a real couple struggling with intense difficulties. Anthony Hopkins, as always, is strong in his role as the sage Methuselah. But the real star of “Noah” is Emma Watson, who as Ila shows a broad swath of emotion as the late addition to the family. The film had a $150 million budget, and it seems that little expense was spared. I can attest that the moviemakers did their very best to make this story look as real as they could. They did an awesome job of giving us their interpretation of what happened in those four short chapters in B’reishit- the Book of Genesis...