"Brings the nineteenth century to life, with its attendant disease, violence, and colonial machinations.”—
Jewish Book Council
“In Rovner's deeply researched biography, the adventurer's swashbuckling memoirs are. . . . a crowbar of sorts, used to pry open a window onto an era of possibility, prejudice and burgeoning colonial avarice.”—
NPR
This vivid reconstruction of one man’s life reveals the harsh realities and moral ambiguities of colonial power.
The Jew Who Would Be King
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.