The Jew Who Would Be King: A True Story of Shipwreck, Survival, and Scandal in Victorian Africa with Adam Rovner (U California Press, 2025)
October 3, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readThe Jew Who Would Be King: Shipwreck, Survival, and Scandal in Victorian Africa
In 1904, the British Jewish writer Israel Zangwill mentioned a "Jewish Zulu king named Isaacs" in a speech. Adam Rovner, then researching a book about territorialism, filed that reference away as odd but intriguing. Years later, he returned to it and discovered that Zangwill was not making things up. The result is The Jew Who Would Be King, a narrative biography of Nathaniel Isaacs, a 19th-century British Jewish merchant-adventurer whose life spanned shipwreck, Zulu warfare, treaty negotiations, and accusations of slavery—all while navigating the precarious position of being Jewish in the British Empire.
Who Nathaniel Isaacs Was and Where He Went
Nathaniel Isaacs was born around 1808 in Canterbury, England, to a poor Jewish family. After his father died, his mother sent him to St. Helena, a remote British island in the South Atlantic, to work for his wealthy merchant uncle, Solomon. St. Helena was then famous as Napoleon's prison after Waterloo, and Solomon had grown rich supplying luxury goods—Bordeaux wine, pasta, and other items—to Napoleon and his entourage. Documentary evidence suggests that Solomon and his brother also helped Napoleon pass clandestine correspondence to supporters in Europe, which was not what the British authorities wanted.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (02:31) **Welcome & Book Introduction** - Host Jean-Arine Guttefin introduces Adam Rovner and his new book about Nathaniel Isaacs, a 19th-century British Jewish merchant-adventurer.
- 2 (03:33) **Genesis of the Book** - Rovner explains how a chance reference in a 1904 speech by Israel Zangwill led him to investigate the "crazy" claim of a Jewish Zulu king named Isaacs.
- 3 (05:58) **Who Was Nathaniel Isaacs?** - Rovner describes Isaacs’s origins in Canterbury, his Jewish family, and his early life before being shipped to his uncle on St. Helena.
- 4 (08:05) **St. Helena and Napoleon** - Rovner details Isaacs’s uncle Solomon’s rise as a merchant on St. Helena, including his clandestine relationship with the imprisoned Napoleon.
- 5 (11:14) **The Geographical Landscape of Isaacs’s Life** - Rovner traces Isaacs’s travels from England to St. Helena, Cape Town, Zululand, Madagascar, the Comoros, Kenya, Somalia, and back to England.
- 6 (14:31) **The Matakong Island Fortress** - Rovner describes how Isaacs built a modern port, a fortress, and a military force on Matakong, amassing wealth and power until he was accused of holding slaves.
- 7 (16:49) **The Ambiguity of Slavery and Abolition** - Rovner explores the contradiction between Isaacs’s public opposition to the slave trade and his probable involvement in holding slaves.
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Show Notes
This vivid reconstruction of one man’s life reveals the harsh realities and moral ambiguities of colonial power.
The Jew Who Would Be King: A True Story of Shipwreck, Survival, and Scandal in Victorian Africa (U California Press, 2025) tells the story of Nathaniel Isaacs—a nineteenth-century British Jew who helped establish the Zulu kingdom only to become a ruthless warlord and slaveholder. Isaacs’ thrilling journey begins with his shipwreck on the shores of Zululand and proceeds to ports across West Africa, including Freetown, Sierra Leone. There, tasked by the colonial governor to end the local slave trade, Isaacs brokered deals that reinforced his own power.
Adam Rovner’s meticulous archival research in England, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and St. Helena, coupled with his own travels to the remnants of Isaacs’ island stronghold in Guinea, brings this complex figure to life. Through Isaacs’ story, Rovner exposes the entangled forces of Jewish emancipation and antisemitism, slavery and abolition, the stark dichotomies of civilization and “savagery,” and the creation of whiteness versus Blackness.
Adam Rovner is Associate Professor of English and Jewish Literature at the University of Denver. He is the author of In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel (New York University Press, 2014).
Geraldine Gudefin is a modern Jewish historian researching Jewish migrations, family life, and legal pluralism. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.
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