The Jew who would be king A true story of shipwreck, survival, and scandal in Victorian Africa

Adam Rovner, 1970-

Book - 2025

"The Jew Who Would Be King tells the improbable story of one of the nineteenth-century's most intrepid and controversial explorers, Nathaniel Isaacs, a British Jew who helped the legendary King Shaka establish the Zulu nation, but who later became a ruthless warlord and slave holder in Sierra Leone. Isaacs was an English merchant, adventurer, and author who published a celebrated account of his shipwreck and survival among the Zulu in Travels and Adventures in Eastern Africa (1836). His desperate scramble for fame, wealth, power, and love opens a new vista on to the way individuals experienced the upheavals of early globalization and the rise of Empire. The Jew Who Would Be King weaves together private lives and public history to ...offer a nuanced perspective on the mechanics of colonialism"--

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Subjects
Genres
Biographies
Published
Oakland, California : University of California Press [2025]
Language
English
Main Author
Adam Rovner, 1970- (author)
Physical Description
xiv, 326 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9780520403000
  • Prologue
  • Introduction
  • Jews and other savages (1808-1825)
  • Strange surprising adventures (1825-1827)
  • Black Napoleon (1827-1828)
  • Appetite for consumption (1828-1832)
  • Feverish trade (1832-1837)
  • Railroad Christianization (1837-1853)
  • The Queen vs. the King (1853-1856)
  • Savage invasions (1856-1872)
  • Postscript.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

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 (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.