I just found out Ben is Jewish. Though truth is, I always suspected he was.

Granted, the evidence was inconclusive, nothing that would hold up in court. Still, there was that name, Benjamin Jacob Grimm, which invokes not one, but two, Jewish patriarchs. Then, there was the fact that he was from Manhattan’s Lower East Side, to which so many Jewish immigrants came fresh from Ellis Island. And finally, there was just something about him, something in his pugnacity, fatalism and humor, that struck me as characteristically Jewish.

And maybe you’re wondering why I didn’t just ask the guy.

Well, I couldn’t because he does not, technically speaking, exist.

Ben Grimm was created by writer Stanley Lieber and artist Jacob Kurtzberg two men of Jewish heritage who worked professionally as Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. In 1961, they produced a comic book called the “Fantastic Four,” about a man whose limbs could stretch to preposterous lengths, a teen-ager who could become a creature of living fire, a woman who could make herself invisible, and Ben “the Thing,” a monstrous creature with rocky orange skin.

It’s probably significant that he was an outcast, an object of misunderstanding and fear. And that his humor helped him cope. I’m told Kirby kept in his home a private sketch of the character that was never intended for publication. It depicted Ben wearing what “Fantastic Four” editor Tom Brevoort calls “full Jewish regalia” one imagines the dark hat and long coat of the Hasidim and holding a Torah.

Evidently, in the minds of his creators, Ben was always Jewish. But they never called him that in print. I guess they never felt they could. As Brevoort puts it, “The expectations of the time didn’t permit that.”

Forty-one years later, things have changed. This month, Brevoort published a story that takes Ben back to his old stomping grounds and, for the first time, reveals his religious roots. “You’re really Jewish?” asks the villain of the piece.

“There a problem with that?” replies the Thing.

“No,” says the bad guy, looking into that craggy, orange puss. “It’s just … you don’t look Jewish.”

I’ve been smiling ever since I read that. Apparently, lots of people have. According to Brevoort, the reader e-mail so far has been nothing but positive. “It’s certainly encouraging,” he says. “By the same token, there’s a scene in one of my other books, “Captain Marvel,” in which two female characters share a kiss. We’ve gotten all sorts of mail on that, people upset by that.”

Small wonder. Gays today are in a position roughly analogous to that of Jews 41 years ago. The mainstream knows they’re there and is vaguely tolerant of their presence, so long as they are silent, unthreatening and well-behaved. So long as they do nothing that calls attention to who and what they are. So long as they don’t, as critics put it, “flaunt” themselves.

As an African American, I “flaunt” my identity merely by being seen. So I’ve always been intrigued by this other means of assimilation, where physical distinction is not such a dividing line and blending in more a matter of things you don’t say, wear, or do. Where it’s an act of bravery simply to be who you are.

“Oh, you’re Jewish? I never knew.”

“You’re gay? I didn’t realize.”

It is, I suspect, just a different kind of hurt.

Brevoort says there wasn’t a lot of hand-wringing involved in the decision to do this story. And certainly, in the decade after “Seinfeld,” two years after Joe Lieberman was nearly elected vice president, it’s hard to imagine anything less newsworthy than the fact that somebody is a Jewish … whatever.

Still, it’s sobering to realize that Lieber and Kurtzberg, the celebrated and beloved Lee and Kirby, created a character about whom they never felt free to speak the whole truth. A hero whose secret identity they felt constrained to keep hidden, even from readers who thought they knew him, and knew they loved him.

Now, 41 years later, it’s finally OK for Ben to be a Jew.

That says something about the kind of nation we used to be. And the kind we may yet become.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald.