The Jew Who Would Be King: A True Story of Shipwreck, Survival, and Scandal in Victorian Africa By: Adam Laurence Rovner

Author: Adam Laurence Rovner

This vivid reconstruction of one man’s life of adventure reveals the harsh realities and moral ambiguities of colonial power.

The Jew Who Would Be King tells the improbable true story of Nathaniel Isaacs—a nineteenth-century British Jew who helped establish the Zulu kingdom only to later 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. The Jew Who Would Be King is a masterful narrative that intertwines Isaacs’ personal ambition with the epic machinations of early globalization. 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.