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WORK TITLE: The Jew Who Would Be King
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WEBSITE: http://www.adamrovner.com/
CITY: Denver
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LAST VOLUME: CA 376
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PERSONAL
Born April 20, 1970.
EDUCATION:Washington University, B.A., 1992; Hebrew University of Jerusalem, M.A. (summa cum laude), 1998; University of Denver, Ph.D., 2003.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, editor, educator, and translator. Indiana University, Bloomington, associate instructor in the Department of English, 1999-2000, associate instructor in the Department of Comparative Literature, 2000-02; DigiPen Institute of Technology, Redmond, WA, adjunct professor in the Department of General Education, 2003-05; Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY, assistant professor and director of the Hebrew Program, 2006-08; University of Denver, Denver, CO, assistant professor, 2008-13, associate professor of English and Jewish literature, beginning 2013, then professor and director of the Center for Judaic Studies. Presenter of invited lectures at universities, including the University of Oxford, England; Florida International University, Miami; Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel; University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel; Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX; Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; the University of Colorado, Boulder; the University of Illinois; and King’s College London, London, England.
AWARDS:Recipient of grants and fellowships, including Lady Davis Fellow, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, 2015-16; Tied for Short Form Prize, Sidewise Awards, 2016, for “What If the Jewish State Had Been Established in East Africa.”
WRITINGS
Writer and director of the documentary No Land without Heaven: Isaac Nachman Steinberg and the Freeland League, University of Denver, screened at the Center for Jewish History, New York, NY, 2011, the Bibliothèque Medem, Maison de la Culture Yiddish, Paris, France, 2012, and the Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon, Israel, 2012. Contributor to books, including Narratives of Dissent: War in Contemporary Israeli Arts and Culture, edited by Rachel S. Harris and Ranen Omer-Sherman, Wayne State University Press, 2012.
SIDELIGHTS
Adam Rovner is an academic whose primary areas of interest are modern Hebrew literature and American Jewish literature. Within these general areas of study, Rovner is interested in English, Hebrew, and Yiddish narrative theory; literature and Jewish nationalism; Holocaust literature; and English, Hebrew, and Yiddish translation. A contributor to periodicals and books, Rovner often writes about the intellectual history of Territorialism, which was the ideological movement in the first half of the twentieth century to create homelands for persecuted Jews. This subject is the focus of his book In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands before Israel, which presents six examples of visions of a Jewish national home outside the land of Israel as presented in the Bible.
Through most of the nineteenth century into the post-Holocaust era, the world’s nations were either trying to expel their Jewish populations or were adamant about not letting expelled Jewish refugees into their countries. The result was that numerous proposals came about for the establishment of Jewish states. “Between roughly 1820 and 1948, intellectuals advanced proposals aimed at carving out Jewish territories at remote and often hostile locations,” writes Rovner in the preface to In the Shadow of Zion. “The would-be founding fathers of these imaginary Zions dispatched survey teams to far-flung locales and filed reports on the states they planned to establish.”
Rovner tells the stories of these now largely forgotten proposed states and the people who planned on establishing them. He begins with an account of the effort, from 1818 to 1848, to establish a Jewish state called Ararat on Grand Island in the Niagara River in New York. Next, the book examines an effort to establish a Jewish state in what is now Uganda, covering the period 1903-05. The other four examples include plans for Angola (1907-14), Madagascar (1913-42), Tasmania (1940-45), and Suriname (1938-48).
Many Zionists liked the Ugandan plan, including Theodor Herzl and Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, which called for an interim Jewish state until a permanent one could be established in Palestine. Many of those attending the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, in 1903, where the plan was introduced, were in favor of giving the plan serious consideration. However, the Russian delegates were so vehemently opposed to the plan that they walked out of the meeting. The effort to establish a Jewish state in Tasmania in Australia was the brainchild of Isaac Steinberg, an Orthodox Jew from Russia and the first commissar of justice in the Bolshevik government. The plan failed after Steinberg died of starvation and exposure while exploring Tasmania for a suitable spot.
In examining the various proposals, Rovner explains why specific locations were deemed desirable for the Jewish people and explores the disadvantages of each locale, both for Jewish settlers and the people who already lived there. He also profiles many of the people who took part in these plans. In addition, Rovner details the political ramifications and machinations connected to each proposal. He explains how various political entities and factions felt about the proposals, including those associated with the British, the Ottomans, and the Portuguese, and the connections between each of the schemes.
In the Shadow of Zion “is ideal for both those with a general interest in Jewish history as well as for academics,” wrote Jewish Eye Web site contributor Anna Dogole. “The text is written in an engaging narrative style that makes it accessible to everyone.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor commented: “Rovner provides ample evidence for his thought-provoking argument that one success among these varied visions might have changed global geography forever.”
(open new)In The Jew Who Would Be King: A True Story of Shipwreck, Survival, and Scandal in Victorian Africa, looks into the history of the nineteenth-century British Jewish adventurer Nathaniel Isaacs. He recounts that after Isaacs moved to St. Helena to join relatives in their business there, he later sailed to southern Africa, where he joined the armed forces of King Shaka Zulu and served in his court. Isaacs then established a business in Sierra Leone but was forced to return to England after getting into trouble with the local British administration for interfering with the British slave trade.
Calling the book “engaging,” a Kirkus Reviews contributor labelled it “a dazzling work of research, written with the flair of a novel.” Writing on the Jewish Book Council website, Brian Hillman reasoned that “Rovner brings the nineteenth century to life, with its attendant disease, violence, and colonial machinations. He compares European and African perspectives when possible…. His antihero, Nathaniel Isaacs, emerges as an amoral opportunist; one with a specific set of opportunities that are inconceivable to us today.” In an article in the Times of Israel, Rich Tenorio pointed out that Rovner “did extensive archival research, visiting locales including Cape Town, St. Helena, and the Sierra Leonean capital of Freetown.” Writing in Jewish Journal, Stuart Halpern concluded that Isaacs’ “story remains one worthy of being read, as masterfully told in Rovner’s account. Though largely forgotten today, Nathaniel Isaacs, the unlikely Jewish British adventurer, continues to shape how we perceive Africa, a land foreign to our own, one that continues to possess the possibilities of exploration, excitement and the lure of the unknown.”(close new)
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2014, review of In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands before Israel; February 15, 2025, review of The Jew Who Would Be King: A True Story of Shipwreck, Survival, and Scandal in Victorian Africa.
ONLINE
Adam Rovner website, https://www.adamrovner.com (September 20, 2025).
College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences, The University of Denver website, https://liberalarts.du.edu/ (September 20, 2025), author profile.
Jewish Book Council website, https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/ (April 14, 2025), Brian Hillman, review of The Jew Who Would Be King.
Jewish Eye, http://www.thejewisheye.com/ (April 13, 2015), Anna Dogole, review of In the Shadow of Zion.
Jewish Journal, https://jewishjournal.com/ (May 14, 2025), Stuart Halpern, review of The Jew Who Would Be King.
JWeekly.com, http:// www.jweekly.com/ (November 6, 2014), Howard Freedman, “Was Diaspora Good for the Jews? Read On,” includes review of In the Shadow of Zion.
Times of Israel, https://www.timesofisrael.com/ (April 26, 2025), Rich Tenorio, review of The Jew Who Would Be King.
University of Denver Web site, http://www.du.edu/ (May 25, 2015), author faculty profile.
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Rovner’s first book, In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel, focuses on authors who promoted the creation of autonomous Jewish homelands beyond the borders of the biblical land of Israel. Rovner’s book received praise in numerous periodicals, including in the pages of the Jerusalem Post, The Jewish Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement. A film adaptation is currently in development by Israeli director Ari Folman. Rovner’s own short documentary, No Land Without Heaven: Isaac Nachman Steinberg & the Freeland League, was screened in Israel, New York City, and Paris.
His latest book, The Jew Who Would Be King: A True Story of Shipwreck, Survival, and Scandal in Victorian Africa, is based on newly uncovered archival materials sourced from across the globe. Rovner’s book centers on 19th-century Anglo-Jewish merchant-adventurer Nathaniel Isaacs, who penned the first account of the Zulu people and their famed king, Shaka. Isaacs became a Zulu chieftain under Shaka and a power-broker within the Zulu Kingdom. After his return to England, he published a sensational two-volume travelogue of pre-colonial South Africa (1836). Isaacs later relocated to Sierra Leone where he became a wealthy importer-exporter. He then leveraged his contact with indigenous leaders to become the sole ruler of a private island kingdom that threatened British colonial interests and challenged Her Majesty’s efforts to interdict the slave trade.
Rovner has worked in an Atlantic City hotel casino, milked cows on a kibbutz, taught at a video game college, traveled to archives across the world, lectured internationally, survived an attack by a rabid dog in Surinam, and escaped from detention on a remote Guinean island. He currently holds the title of North America’s Strongest Director of Judaic Studies (pound-for-pound). Adam Rovner is a dual American-Israeli national who lives in Denver, Colorado.
Adam L. Rovner
Professor; Director, Center for Judaic Studies
Faculty
College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Center for Judaic Studies
English & Literary Arts
adam.rovner@du.edu
303-871-2861 (Office)
https://www.adamrovner.com/
Personal
Sturm Hall, 2000 East Asbury Avenue Denver, CO 80208
What I do
Adam Rovner writes about himself in the third person.
Professional Biography
I was born and raised in the United States, and completed my undergraduate studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Later, I lived in Israel for several years and became a naturalized citizen of that country. During my time in Israel I milked cows on a kibbutz, waited tables and managed an Italian restaurant in Jerusalem, served in the military as an educator and administrator, and completed my M.A. in comparative literature at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I later received my Ph.D. in comparative literature from Indiana University, where I further developed my expertise in Holocaust literature, Hebrew literature, and humor studies.
Prior to coming to the University of Denver, I taught literature and narrative theory at the DigiPen Institute of Technology (Redmond, WA; 2003-2006), and was an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and Languages at Hofstra University and Director of the Hebrew program (Hempstead, NY; 2006-2008)
Degree(s)
Ph.D., Comparative Literature, Indiana University, 2003
MA, Comparative Literature, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1998
BA, English, Washington University, 1992
Licensure / Accreditations
Licensed to Ill
Rovner, Adam THE JEW WHO WOULD BE KING Univ. of California (NonFiction None) $32.95 4, 15 ISBN: 9780520403000
Delving into a little-known odyssey.
This engaging history tells the story of Nathaniel Isaacs (1808-1872), a British Jewish adventurer whose exploits, writes Rovner, "can be seen as a cross between an orphaned hero from a Charles Dickens novel and a character from an H. Rider Haggard African adventure." Isaacs was born to a merchant family in London. He traveled to the island of St. Helena, where Napoleon was in exile, to join his relatives in their commercial work. He sailed to southern Africa, where he served in the court and the armed forces of King Shaka Zulu. He worked in East Africa, building a successful business in Sierra Leone. Eventually, he fell afoul of the British administration and wound up back in England. This book relies in part on Isaacs' memoir, rich with brilliantly limned characters, scenes of epic depravity, and moral judgments. Much of that may be made up, but Rovner, author ofIn the Shadow of Zion, gets behind its fantasy to excavate the complex history of race relations, colonial expansion, and Jewish identity. At the heart of the book is a story about changing notions of race and religion. Were Jews believed to be related to Africans? What role did Jews play in "the great game" of African exploitation and the slave trade? On Matakong Island, off the coast of Guinea, Isaacs tested the limits of power. He became a "culture broker, mediating between Indigenous and colonial interests." He established his own private army. Readers watch Isaacs' descent into slave-trading turpitude, "until finally the serpent's egg of unrestrained power hatched within his soul, and he brutalized the bodies of those who sought little more than scraps of clothing, a bowl of rice, a morsel of meat." Good and evil blur in this story, and Rovner's evocative writing and scrupulous scholarship reveal a world that will be new, even to those familiar with colonial history.
A dazzling work of research, written with the flair of a novel.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Rovner, Adam: THE JEW WHO WOULD BE KING." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A827101226/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f229b50f. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
The Jew Who Would Be King: A True Story of Shipwreck, Survival, and Scandal in Victorian Africa
Adam Rovner
Review
By Brian Hillman – April 14, 2025
Nathaniel Isaacs (1808−1872) can generously be described as a sailor, an entrepreneur, a writer, a diplomat, and an adventurer. There is strong evidence that he was also a slave-trader, an absentee father, a vicious mercenary, and a general dissembler. Adam Rover’s Isaacs’s biography of Isaacs, The Jew Who Would Be King, functions as an entry point into discussions of colonialism, racism, antisemitism, Christian missionization, and political strategy. It is also a case study in responsible historiography and biography, narrating the life story of a person who did terrible things without neglecting the memory and significance of his victims.
The Jew Who Would be King traces Isaacs’s life from his birth into a Jewish family in Canterbury, England to his death at sea. At fourteen, he was apprenticed to his uncle Saul Solomon, a merchant on the island of St. Helena, roughly a thousand miles off the coast of West Africa. (Napoleon was exiled to the island during Isaac’s time there.) Isaacs gained skills that would serve him economically and interpersonally when, in 1825, Isaacs boarded a ship named The Mary. After several stops, The Mary was shipwrecked on Port Natal (contemporary Durban, South Africa). During his time in Africa, Isaac became entangled with King Shaka Zulu, the ruler of the Zulu Kingdom. Isaac sought to gain control of parts of the surrounding area with Shaka’s consent. Fickle and moody, Shaka, once feeling slighted, forced Isaacs to join his army. With Shaka, Isaacs served as a mercenary soldier and trader in ivory, hippopotamus teeth, and gum. Isaac’s account of Shaka’s brutality and vanity may have been sensationalized, but likely not fabricated; African sources attest to his violence and his desire for a hair tonic called macassar oil.
After Shaka was murdered, Isaacs returned to Britain and published the two-volume Travels and Adventures in Eastern Africa in London in 1836. The book was remarkably popular, shaping perceptions of the “savage” lands to which Isaacs traveled and King Shaka Zulu. The book trades on orientalist and racist stereotypes of Africa while also portraying Shaka as a skilled ruler.
As a Jew, Isaacs fit uncomfortably into the nineteenth-century British racial imaginary. Jewish people were often pushed into marginal economic roles in society, leading to negative economic and hygienic stereotypes. Their place in the burgeoning racial hierarchy among “Black” Africans and “white” Europeans was debated. Despite his Jewish heritage, Isaacs was not traditionally observant and would strategically hide his Jewish identity.
While in Africa, Isaacs fathered (and usually abandoned) several children. Although little information about them or how their mothers came to know Isaacs is available, additional context for these kinds of entanglements and their attendant power dynamics would be beneficial to the reader.
Isaacs returned to Africa as a merchant and colonial commissioner tasked with negotiating an end to slave trading. Despite this, he gained control of the remote Matakong Island, and there is ample evidence that he was engaged in the slave trade. Several Europeans strove unsuccessfully to bring him to justice.
Rovner brings the nineteenth century to life, with its attendant disease, violence, and colonial machinations. He compares European and African perspectives when possible (e.g. using the isiZulu term abelungu for white people). His antihero, Nathaniel Isaacs, emerges as an amoral opportunist; one with a specific set of opportunities that are inconceivable to us today.
Brian Hillman is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Towson University.
How a 19th-century British Jew became a Zulu chieftain and slaveholding warlord
In new book ‘The Jew Who Would Be King,’ historian Adam Rovner tells the story of Nathaniel Isaacs, who survived a shipwreck and went on to a life of wealth, adventure and corruption
By Rich Tenorio Follow
26 April 2025, 8:26 am
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Detail from a newspaper illustration of Nathaniel Isaacs's colony in Matakong. (Courtesy of Adam Rovner)
Detail from a newspaper illustration of Nathaniel Isaacs's colony in Matakong. (Courtesy of Adam Rovner)
Nathaniel Isaacs’s life defied convention. A white Jewish Englishman who came of age during the early 19th century, he spent much of his career on the outer reaches of the British Empire in Africa. In South Africa, he won the trust of the famed indigenous leader Shaka Zulu, who made Isaacs a chieftain while pursuing bloody wars against other tribes. Later, as a British agent in West Africa, Isaacs negotiated treaties with local rulers to end the slave trade — yet he eventually became a slaveholding warlord himself.
Historian Adam Rovner documents Isaacs’s eventful life in a new book, “The Jew Who Would Be King: A True Story of Shipwreck, Survival, and Scandal in Victorian Africa.” The University of California Press published it on April 15.
Early in his career, “Isaacs played the role of a Joseph — a kind of adviser to King Shaka,” Rovner tells The Times of Israel in a phone conversation. “Later, in West Africa, he became a kind of Pharaoh, a hard-headed holder of those against their will.”
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But “it’s not exactly a Passover story,” says Rovner, who directs a Judaic studies center at the University of Denver, where he is also an English professor. “He… did not undertake an exodus. It was a self-exile. The only way he can really make it as a working-class poor Jew in Georgian England is to get to the very fringes of empire and try to make a name for himself with whatever he had — his guts and the ability to outwit those out to get him.”
When the author first came across the story, he didn’t even know the subject’s name. It happened while researching a previous book — “In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Zion.” One primary source proved unexpectedly intriguing: A speech by British playwright Israel Zangwill, active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Zangwill — best-known for popularizing the term “melting pot” with his play of the same name — was discoursing on how the Jews had as much right to a homeland as anyone else. While making his argument, Zangwill included a reference to an unnamed Jewish Zulu king. Suffice it to say, it piqued Rovner’s interest and sparked an online search.
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“[Isaacs] had been written about in a couple of sketchy articles and one self-published genealogical book,” Rovner says. “It was a good story and I started researching it.” As the author learned, there was “much more to Isaacs than just the unlikely fact that he was a Zulu chieftain.”
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Far-flung research project
Researching this story took Rovner far from his home base in Colorado. He kept customs officials busy, visiting a slew of international destinations connected to the narrative: England, South Africa, Sierra Leone… even the island of St. Helena, where Napoleon was living out his life in exile just as a certain teenage Brit came there to apprentice with an uncle in the import-export business. The author did extensive archival research, visiting locales including Cape Town, St. Helena and the Sierra Leonean capital of Freetown.
“To me, it’s important not only to have the… paper records from the archive,” Rovner says. “I also like to pursue ‘the archive of the feet’ — tread the same ground… the same sites, the same places, perhaps the same peoples as those that had lived in Isaacs’s time. To me, it makes it more real.”
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That included a melancholy visit to the remote island of Matakong, off the coast of Guinea. There, far from British eyes, Isaacs became a warlord, holding slaves — and, the author says, perhaps dealing in slaves, as well. A high-level British government attempt to prosecute Isaacs for slaveholding ultimately foundered.
As might be expected, narrating Isaacs’s life presented multiple challenges to the author.
Author and historian Adam Rovner at the grave of Nathaniel Isaacs in Canterbury, UK. (Courtesy)
“It’s a non-redemptive story,” Rovner explains. “He starts out an admirer of Zulu culture,” and expresses “opposition to the slave trade” in a multi-volume memoir. “Later on, he’s slowly, slowly sucked into it.”
There was the thorny issue of a white Jew holding Black slaves. The narrative of Jews in the slave trade has been a contentious one over the decades due to controversial and disputed claims about the extent of Jews’ role in it.
“Obviously, there were Jews involved in the slave trade,” Rovner says. “They were not the primary movers,” although they had “surplus visibility.”
And, he adds, Isaacs might have been a case unto himself — unlike previous slaveholding Jews in the British Empire, he held slaves after England had abolished the slave trade in 1833: “What we have is someone working on the frontiers of empire, subverting British interests… I don’t think it’s a reflection of his Judaism. Someone who thinks it is might need to think about themselves making antisemitic stereotypes.”
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The oldest hatred shapes and follows the Jewish Zulu
The book explores the role of antisemitism in Isaacs’s life. He was born in 1808 in Canterbury. Its name, inextricably connected to an archbishop, also featured a sizeable Jewish population in the early 19th century.
While his father exited the historical record early on in Isaacs’s life, he was close to his mother and received something of a Jewish education in a country where there were few Jews yet multiple forms of antisemitism: a cruder form fueled by folkloric stereotypes, and a supposedly more genteel form that the landed class allegedly used to exclude Jews from legal rights enjoyed by other Britons.
The headquarters of Solomon and Co., the business belonging to Nathaniel Isaacs’s uncle and where he worked, in Jamestown, Saint Helena. (Courtesy of Adam Rovner)
Antisemitism followed the Isaacs family to St. Helena. Although Nathaniel’s uncles there attended church, they presumably did so because it was mandatory, and even this could not spare them from local antisemitic ire. Locals also resented him and his brother Lewis Solomon becoming confidants of the imprisoned Napoleon.
After three years on St. Helena, Isaacs befriended an ambitious Canadian sea captain, James Saunders King, who invited him to join a bid for fortune in South Africa. King and Isaacs successfully journeyed to Cape Town, but a subsequent trip to Port Natal — in search of one of King’s lost comrades who had been entrusted with creating a trading post — ended in a shipwreck. King, Isaacs and other crew members survived, thanks in part to a hospitable reception from the Zulus. They learned that members of the previous expedition to create a trading post were very much alive. Shaka requested to meet with the white newcomers. Those who obliged included Isaacs, who brought a massive stash of ivory to the Zulu leader.
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“For the Zulus, the fact that Isaacs was Jewish, that he did not have the right pedigree… meant nothing,” Rovner says. “In that way, the Zulus were far more equal than the British society.”
A bloody existence
The book describes Zulu atrocities committed against other tribes and among their own population.
Isaacs won renown among the Zulus by participating in a deadly attack on another tribe, during which he sustained a wound in the back. As a result, Shaka bestowed a “praise name” or honorific on Isaacs, who later received a chieftaincy, which came with a plot of land.
The remains of Nathaniel Isaacs’s Matakong pier. (Courtesy of Adam Rovner)
“He tries to get the British interested in the territory he had been granted,” Rovner says. “The British were not interested in a teenage Jewish guy with no social standing, not much education, developing the empire.”
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By the time Isaacs left South Africa, he had fathered children with an African woman. He returned to England with a high opinion of Shaka, and the praiseful descriptions of the Zulu leader in Isaacs’s autobiography allegedly spawned a more mythical depiction of Shaka’s military prowess, a myth subsequently propagated in the bestselling novels of H. Rider Haggard.
A sketch of Shaka Zulu attributed to James Saunders King that appeared in Nathaniel Isaacs’s book, ‘Travels and Adventures in Eastern Africa.’ (Public domain)
Act two of Isaacs’s life began with another business venture in Africa. Here, he did so well in his dealings with local kings that the British government recruited him to make a different sort of deal: In exchange for British products, local rulers would end the slave trade. Rovner documented nine such treaties made by Isaacs.
‘The Jew Who Would Be King,’ by Adam Rovner. (Courtesy)
Eventually, Isaacs became wealthy enough to purchase Matakong Island, where he modernized its port and trained a private army.
“Unfortunately, it seems the power went to his head,” Rovner says. “He was corrupted. He wound up holding slaves, if not dealing in them.”
“Domestic slavery was long practiced in Western Africa by various cultures, civilizations and groups,” he adds. “It seems as if Isaacs kind of used [the local practice of] domestic slavery as an excuse for holding people in bondage.”
In West Africa, Isaacs fathered two more children, a son and a daughter, with Mary Ann Lightbourn, a woman of mixed European and African heritage who had a family connection to slave trading. After their relationship ended, Isaacs entered a new relationship with another woman of European and African parentage, Hannah Hayes, whom Rovner suggests could have convinced him to become a slave trader himself.
“You could interpret it as a kind of Macbeth situation, with the woman as Lady Macbeth,” Rovner says. “Above all, he was a very shrewd businessperson. He likely saw he could make money and wealth… dealing in human souls.”
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When one of Isaacs’s daughters became a young adult, she traveled with him to Liverpool, where Isaacs’s sister and brother-in-law were active in the local Jewish community. Isaacs’s daughter married an Irish immigrant whom Rovner presumes was non-Jewish. Yet, Rovner notes, even up to Isaacs’s death in 1872, he maintained ties to Judaism.
“His daughter and son-in-law transported his body… to the old Jewish cemetery in Canterbury,” Rovner says. “He was buried next to his mother… He considered himself, at the base, Jewish. His Jewish identity clearly meant something to him — perhaps sentimentally.”
The Jew Who Would Be King: A True Story of Shipwreck, Survival, and Scandal in Victorian Africa by Adam Laurence Rovner
Rabbi Dr. Stuart Halpern
May 14, 2025
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When Jewish comic book creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the Black Panther character for Marvel, neither probably knew that they owed a debt of gratitude to a long-dead coreligionist. But as a new book shows, a 19th-century Jewish adventurer named Nathaniel Isaacs helped shape the myth from which the fictional African nation of Wakanda and its fearless leader emerged.
Adam Rovner’s “The Jew Who Would be King: A True Story of Shipwreck, Survival and Scandal in Victorian Africa” tells the fascinating tale of Isaacs, a British-born explorer who spent significant time as a young man with the legendary African ruler Shaka Zulu, a military innovator who reigned in southern Africa from 1816-1828. Isaacs wrote about his experiences across the continent, including his time with Zulu, in “Travels and Adventures in Eastern Africa,” published in 1836. As Rovner, associate professor of English and director of the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Denver, notes, Isaac’s memoir inspired a late 19th-century novel, “King’s Solomon’s Mines,” which has never gone out of print. That book’s author, H. Rider Haggard, considered Zulu a “Napoleon” type who was a “colossal genius and most evil man,” ruthlessly ruling his kingdom with an iron fist.
In “King Solomon’s Mines,” Haggard “depicted the breakaway Zulu kingdom of Kukuanaland, which had once been exploited by the biblical Solomon for its mineral riches,” as Rovner recounts. One of the heroes of the novel, a fearless warrior, “returns to his ancestral home to claim his rightful throne from a cruel tyrant who had instituted a system of militarization even more ruthless than that of ‘Chaka in Zululand.’”
These tales of Shaka, in turn, not only inspired Black Panther (who, Rovner notes, had a father whose name is T’Chaka, an homage to Shaka), but other beloved tales of adventure in Africa as well. Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Lost World” (1912), Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “The Land that Time Forgot” (1918) and the Indiana Jones movies draw thematically and stylistically from Isaacs’ tales.
Isaacs the man, however, as Rovner details, was no model worthy of imitation. Seeking economic opportunity in the shadow of the Napoleonic Wars, he dealt arms in West Africa, was a mercenary with blood on his hands and a harsh manipulator of men (and exploiter of women, with whom he fathered multiple children and subsequently abandoned). A serial entrepreneur, trader, local warlord, map-maker, explorer and advocate for British colonialism, Isaacs, “hardy and reckless, audacious and greedy, courageous and cruel,” shaped British imperial history for decades.
Perhaps as surprising as Isaacs’ influence on the creation of a comic book character is how he was used as a footnote in support of the cause of Zionism. Israel Zangwill, the renowned playwright who wrote “The Melting Pot,” was a supporter of Theodor Herzl’s dream of a reborn Jewish state. He learned of Isaacs, possibly through Haggard’s writings, and saw him as a figure who proved the possibility of Jewish territorial self-determination. Zangwill, Rovner writes, referenced “a Jew named Nathaniel Isaacs[ [who], having fought for a Zulu king, was granted a large territory, with the title ‘Chief of Natal.’” To Zangwill, Isaacs demonstrated that the Israelites could “produce men … who can win territories and men who can govern them.”
Zangwill, who opposed dispossession of indigenous people, as Rovner cautions, did not realize the unsavory nature of Isaacs’ character and the exact nature of his actions. To him, Isaacs simply showed that through strength and determination Jews might lay claim to political self-determination.
Thankfully, Isaacs did not end up serving as a moral model for Zionism in any practical way. None of Israel’s founding thinkers or governmental leaders cite his briefly held political power in Africa as precedent.
But his story remains one worthy of being read, as masterfully told in Rovner’s account. Though largely forgotten today, Nathaniel Isaacs, the unlikely Jewish British adventurer, continues to shape how we perceive Africa, a land foreign to our own, one that continues to possess the possibilities of exploration, excitement and the lure of the unknown.