2026 Naamani Memorial Jewish Culture Event

Event Details

Please join us for the 2026 Naamani Memorial Jewish Culture Event: 

Professor Adam Rovner

The Jew Who Would Be King:

    The True Story of a Jewish Zulu Chieftain in the 19th Century

Sunday, April 19, at 2:00-3:30 p.m.

The Susan and William Yarmuth Jewish Studies Reading Room

Ekstrom Library, 3rd Floor, University of Louisville                           

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. Through meticulous archival research in England, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and St. Helena, as well as the author’s own travels to the remnants of Isaacs’ island stronghold in Guinea, Rovner brings this complex figure to life. Isaacs’ story reveals the harsh realities and moral ambiguities of colonial power and 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. This exciting historical study has been hailed as “a dazzling work of research, written with the flair of a novel” and praised for its "evocative writing and scrupulous scholarship which reveal a world that will be new, even to those familiar with colonial history."