The Jewish Myth-Making African Adventurer

When Jewish comic book creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the Black Panther character for Marvel, neither probably knew that they owed a debt of gratitude to a long-dead coreligionist. But as a new book shows, a 19th-century Jewish adventurer named Nathaniel Isaacs helped shape the myth from which the fictional African nation of Wakanda and its fearless leader emerged.

Adam Rovner’s “The Jew Who Would be King: A True Story of Shipwreck, Survival and Scandal in Victorian Africa” tells the fascinating tale of Isaacs, a British-born explorer who spent significant time as a young man with the legendary African ruler Shaka Zulu, a military innovator who reigned in southern Africa from 1816-1828. Isaacs wrote about his experiences across the continent, including his time with Zulu, in “Travels and Adventures in Eastern Africa,” published in 1836. As Rovner, associate professor of English and director of the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Denver, notes, Isaac’s memoir inspired a late 19th-century novel, “King’s Solomon’s Mines,” which has never gone out of print. That book’s author, H. Rider Haggard, considered Zulu a “Napoleon” type who was a “colossal genius and most evil man,” ruthlessly ruling his kingdom with an iron fist.

In “King Solomon’s Mines,” Haggard “depicted the breakaway Zulu kingdom of Kukuanaland, which had once been exploited by the biblical Solomon for its mineral riches,” as Rovner recounts. One of the heroes of the novel, a fearless warrior, “returns to his ancestral home to claim his rightful throne from a cruel tyrant who had instituted a system of militarization even more ruthless than that of ‘Chaka in Zululand.’”

These tales of Shaka, in turn, not only inspired Black Panther (who, Rovner notes, had a father whose name is T’Chaka, an homage to Shaka), but other beloved tales of adventure in Africa as well. Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Lost World” (1912), Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “The Land that Time Forgot” (1918) and the Indiana Jones movies draw thematically and stylistically from Isaacs’ tales.

Isaacs the man, however, as Rovner details, was no model worthy of imitation. Seeking economic opportunity in the shadow of the Napoleonic Wars, he dealt arms in West Africa, was a mercenary with blood on his hands and a harsh manipulator of men (and exploiter of women, with whom he fathered multiple children and subsequently abandoned). A serial entrepreneur, trader, local warlord, map-maker, explorer and advocate for British colonialism, Isaacs, “hardy and reckless, audacious and greedy, courageous and cruel,” shaped British imperial history for decades. 

Perhaps as surprising as Isaacs’ influence on the creation of a comic book character is how he was used as a footnote in support of the cause of Zionism. Israel Zangwill, the renowned playwright who wrote “The Melting Pot,” was a supporter of Theodor Herzl’s dream of a reborn Jewish state. He learned of Isaacs, possibly through Haggard’s writings, and saw him as a figure who proved the possibility of Jewish territorial self-determination. Zangwill, Rovner writes, referenced “a Jew named Nathaniel Isaacs[ [who], having fought for a Zulu king, was granted a large territory, with the title ‘Chief of Natal.’” To Zangwill, Isaacs demonstrated that the Israelites could “produce men … who can win territories and men who can govern them.”

Zangwill, who opposed dispossession of indigenous people, as Rovner cautions, did not realize the unsavory nature of Isaacs’ character and the exact nature of his actions. To him, Isaacs simply showed that through strength and determination Jews might lay claim to political self-determination. 

Thankfully, Isaacs did not end up serving as a moral model for Zionism in any practical way. None of Israel’s founding thinkers or governmental leaders cite his briefly held political power in Africa as precedent. 

But his story remains one worthy of being read, as masterfully told in Rovner’s account. Though largely forgotten today, Nathaniel Isaacs, the unlikely Jewish British adventurer, continues to shape how we perceive Africa, a land foreign to our own, one that continues to possess the possibilities of exploration, excitement and the lure of the unknown. 

Rabbi Dr. Stuart Halpern is Senior Adviser to the Provost of Yeshiva University and Deputy Director of Y.U.’s Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought. His books include “The Promise of Liberty: A Passover Haggada,” which examines the Exodus story’s impact on the United States, “Esther in America,” “Gleanings: Reflections on Ruth” and “Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land: The Hebrew Bible in the United States.”