Solomon in Africa and England

WHEN HAGGARD imagines a line of white men in Africa claiming and stealing African diamonds, he attempts to legitimize imperial theft by suggesting that white men have a responsibility to take what they have discovered and fought for, thereby perpetuating the line of white rulers in Africa. Thus, the production of Solomonic history by Victorian archeologists, journalists, missionaries, and fiction writers ought not to be read as a cluster of mere anecdotes or coincidences looming in the background of King Solomon's Mines. As my reading shows, Haggard's choice to put diamonds into the hands of a Jewish king living in southern Africa was, in fact, a politically charged move, born from a mixture of scientific facts, Biblical history, Urban Legend, fictional imaginings, and imperial designs. Even though Haggard presents these histories of white-skinned Jews in Africa and of English men who rescue diamonds from a Jewish king as fantasy, the history of the region in the nineteenth century reminds us that there is much more at work in this tale than just a fantastic imagination. Indeed, Haggard even claimed, years after publishing King Solomon's Mines, that “imagination has often proved to be the precursor to truth” (Days 242).

Some of the most important contexts for Haggard's depictions of Solomonic history in Africa were the narrative and graphic images that proliferated in nineteenth-century England depicting European explorations of southern Africa. Travelers and explorers, with varying degrees of knowledge of Biblical archeology, mistakenly conflated the real existence of ancient ruins in Zimbabwe with legends of King Solomon's golden city. Scott T. Carroll explains, “The glamour and fascination posed by the discovery of ancient ruins in southeast Africa captivated a sizable, contemporary literary audience in Europe. Living in a secure Victorian world, the British public experienced vicarious pleasure reading the latest exploits of adventurers in the African interior” (236). Joseph O. Vogel adds that “[t]o scholars of the mid-nineteenth century, Ophir's existence in antiquity went unquestioned” (20). It makes sense that Haggard would choose this well-known myth, believed in his day to be fact, as the starting place for his novel. Although the Portuguese were the first Europeans to record descriptions of the ruins at the great Zimbabwe,⁸

by the middle of the nineteenth century, geographer Karl Ritter and encyclopedist Conrad Malte-Brun recorded that the rumors about the ancient town were widespread and well accepted as fact (Vogel 21). With knowledge of this burgeoning theory about an ancient city, other travelers, geographers, and missionaries ventured into Africa to explore the mystery of their origin. The explorations of St. Vincent Erskine, Thomas Baines, and Alexander Merensky in the 1860s simultaneously spread rumors about Zambesia's gold fields and about lost cities. Vogel warns us though that “the country described in anecdotes from the eighteen-sixties must be regarded as the cumulative product of hearsay and wishful invention rather than authentic eye witness accounts” (22). Even as anthropologists engaged in scientific studies of ancient remains, popular accounts, which were largely unscientific, publicized their work. For example, when the German missionaries Alexander Merensky and Sprediger A. Nachtigal ventured into southeast Africa to find the lost cities, they were ultimately forced to turn back due to their fear of smallpox contamination. The fact that neither arrived at the ruins failed to deter journalists from recording these men's adventures there– complete with detailed descriptions of the ruins, which neither one ever saw. Vogel explains, “At the same time a then well-known article in the Cape and Natal News was fanning the flames of speculation. While Merensky claimed only to have marched in the general direction of the ruins, and Nachtigal is said to have seen the lost city from afar, the Cape and Natal News detailed the town, Egyptian antiquities, and burial caves” (24). By the late 1860s, journalists' embellishments of the missionaries' journeys influenced such works as H. M. Walmsley's novel The Ruined Cities of Zululand (1869) in which several missionaries embark on a journey to find the cities of gold in the interior of Africa in a literary market hungry for information about the real ruined cities. In fact, one of these fictional missionaries exclaims in the novel, “There lie the gold fields of Solomon somewhere in that neighborhood” (qtd. in Carroll 236). Fictional narratives such as these helped to verify the myth that the ruins at Zimbabwe were the same as Solomon's golden Ophir. By the time Karl Mauch set out on his famous journey to discover the ruins at Zimbabwe in 1871, they had already been discovered in popular fiction and press. Indeed, Victorian audiences were ripe for Mauch's findings and for Haggard's novel. Carroll continues, “[u]ndaunted by the question of truth, the Victorians seemed the more eager to adopt Solomon as a precedent to attempt to justify their imperialistic designs in Africa, if not simply to assuage their conscience. Rhodes and company would exploit Africa after the legendary manner of the Hebrew king (and with twice his splendor)” (237). In fact, even though Mauch did not arrive at Zimbabwe until September 5, 1871, his presence there had already been recorded in 1867 by Dr. A. Peterman who affirmed that the ruins Mauch would discover (he obviously knew something of Mauch's intended exploration) were “identical with the Ophir of the Bible” (qtd. in Carroll 238).

Amazingly, popular journalism and Victorian novels, such as Walmsley's and Haggard's, were part of an industry of anthropological mythmaking about African Jewish history. Despite the proliferation of the myth of King Solomon's mines in Victorian culture, Haggard maintains in his essay, “The Real King Solomon's Mines” (1907), that Biblical archeology and popular journalism had absolutely nothing to do with the subject of his novel:

Haggard's claims of ignorance on the subject of Solomonic history make sense given William Minter's observation that “Haggard's fantastic details fitted neither the legend of King Solomon, which referred to gold, not diamonds, nor the historical facts of African gold mining in Zimbabwe” (3). Yet, can we really believe Haggard when he claims that he knew nothing of the ruins of Zimbabwe, or of the great road leading to them? Or that he was ignorant of the mining of Sheba's gold and southern African diamonds? It is unlikely that Haggard would have been completely ignorant of the media coverage of the research conducted by missionaries and archeologists very near where he worked and lived in southern Africa. In fact, such written accounts were not entirely unlike the adventure genre Haggard would later write. In a later commentary about his novel, Haggard confesses that his version of the story came directly from talk of the ruins at Zimbabwe, or, as it was later renamed, Rhodesia. In his posthumously published autobiography Haggard admits: Although Haggard is at least able to acknowledge that he had heard something of the ruins, he could not relinquish his own sense of responsibility in having discovered King Solomon's mines in his imagination and in the popular imaginations of his readers, separate from published accounts by fiction writers and journalists.

Regardless of Haggard's stated impressions on the origins of the Biblical allusions in his novel, we cannot treat lightly the fact that English men carry away Solomon's Jewish diamonds at the novel's conclusion; nor can we ignore the particular forms of Victorian anti-Jewish attitudes that Haggard invokes in this novel. The Jewish subtext in Haggard's novel is produced through a Semitic discourse,⁹

and Jews are essentialized by their associations with diamonds–a signifier with which Haggard's readers were familiar. Although I call these subtexts submerged histories, to a certain extent it is the fact of attempted submersion that renders such narratives of imperial domination both effective and insidious. When Victorian audiences read King Solomon's Mines, they had been prepared for the disclosure of Jewish diamonds by a long history of similar cultural associations linking Jewish greed and British imperialism. In her reading of sixteenth-century explorations of Africa and earlier representations of Solomon and Sheba in English literature, Kim Hall explains, “Solomon's story and his song become a key part of the ‘typology of colonialism,’…. He is both an exemplar of the sage colonial ruler and an example of the dangers of erotic entanglements with foreign women” (108). Solomon was, as Frank Felsenstein reminds us, a frequent appellation in print culture for Jews who incorrectly believed that their wealth would guarantee them insider status by enabling them to pass as English. Felsenstein adds that a prominent late-nineteenth-century version of the oversexed, wealthy Jewish king appears in depictions of Samson Gideon: Indeed, the relationship between Hebrew and Jew, or Ancient Hebrew patriarch and modern-day capitalistic Jew, is part of a complex Semitic discourse that was instrumental in producing racial distinctions between Jews and non-Jews in the Victorian period. Despite the fact that the Biblical King Solomon was a Hebrew King, Haggard's appropriation of this story renders the Hebrew king a Jewish King. The conflation of these terms–Hebrew and Jew–was a common occurrence in nineteenth-century Semitic discourse, as Robert Browning's poem “Solomon and Balkis” (1882) testifies, beginning with the line “Solomon King of the Jews” (Browning 625). The Encyclopedia Judaica explains that the slippage between Jew, Hebrew, and Israelite became even more complicated in the nineteenth century when Jewish people began to call themselves “‘Hebrews’ and ‘Israelites.’ Nevertheless, these new names quickly took on the same pejorative associations as ‘Jew,’ as scores of nineteenth-century novels testify” (10, 23). Even George Eliot refers to this phenomenon in Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879) when she recalls “the worthy child of a people owning the triple name of Hebrew, Israelite, and Jew” (165). Solomon's identity as Hebrew, within the context of his culture, therefore is not a distinct category from that of Jew, but a precursor to modern Jews.

In his reading of late Victorian representations of deviant Jews, which surged in the years following the publication of Haggard's novel and during the search for Jack the Ripper, Sander Gilman maintains that

For Victorians, the wealthy Jewish king evoked myths about his excessive sexuality, witnessed by his polygamy and his alleged sexual relations with Sheba, which inspired Sheba to give him the gold he needed to complete his temple. Within Victorian culture, then, Solomon would be the Jewish king who willingly prostitutes himself to a black matriarch for the sake of glorifying his temple, the sign of his political power. The fact that Haggard chooses to bury Solomon's diamond mines in the end of his novel suggests that Solomon's greed, as with Jewish mercenary and sexual habits in general, bring about his demise.

In the wake of his literary success with King Solomon's Mines and She (1887), numerous parodies surfaced which reveal much about Haggard's readers' reactions to these narratives. In his parody King Solomon's Wives; or, the Phantom Mines (1887), Henry Chartres Biron picked up on Haggard's depiction of Solomon's obsession with money and women. When Biron's adventurers arrive at the cave's orifice, the narrator A. Quarterman (the spelling is noteworthy) explains that the three men needed a penny, which, once inserted into the slot, opens the door to the “dark hole” (95). The humor comes, in part, from the suggestion that Solomon's sexual favors could be purchased for a mere penny. The narrator continues tongue-in-cheek:

It is noteworthy that this narrator refrains from mentioning Solomon's exploits, like Haggard's narrator, yet he depicts instead his own passage through the dark hole. Haggard's Quatermain appears unconscious of this fact, but Biron's Quarterman is apparently much more astute. Solomon's treasure chamber turns out to be filled with the real source of his infamy for Victorian audiences. While in the caves, Biron's adventurers find a scroll entitled “Extract from an unpublished volume of King Solomon's Proverbs” which reads, “What treasure hath man like a good wife and plenty of her” (99). According to Biron's narrative, the phantom mines turn out to have entombed the Jewish King's real claim to fame–his wisdom in taking seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines.

King Solomon's Mines and its parodies clearly imagine Solomon by mocking or ignoring his wise words while recalling instead his great wealth and lust. The fact that these two elements are hidden inside a cave, and are discovered only when the white English men penetrate Solomon's temple remains, evokes a particular Victorian anti-Semitic discourse. Although popular Victorian writing about Africa played a role in producing the myth of Solomon's Golden Ophir in southern Africa, Victorian homophobia and anti-Semitism helped codify the political and sexual implications of Solomon's secret temple. Daniel Itzkovitz explains, “[t]he Jew, like the homosexual, was seen as having a hidden identity, and both were imagined to perform secret acts that substantiated their elusive identities” (179). Although Itzkovitz locates this tradition of linking anti-Semitism with homophobia in late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American culture, Haggard's Victorian images in King Solomon's Mines certainly appear to anticipate and resonate with this American manifestation. Itzkovitz continues:

And what better image to invoke these secrets than Solomon himself–the man who is not only a fabulously rich controller of a closet full of diamonds, but infamous for his sexual liaisons with the queen of Sheba and his harem of wives.¹⁰ Victorian culture imagined Solomon's Jewishness not as a fixed stereotype, but, as Bryan Cheyette has noted of other texts from this period, as one marked by its ambivalence. Cheyette explains: This is exactly what happens in Haggard's construction of Solomon as both a white empire builder who brings civilization into Africa and as a sexually perverse Jew who attempts to hide his wealth and treasures in his secret cave. Read within this collection of contexts–anthropological, sociological, literary, and historical–on so many levels Haggard's Solomon participates in a discourse intent upon viewing Jewish men as effeminate, thereby allowing the English men to penetrate him, and as a sexual pervert because of his licentious and illustrious sexuality. The very title of the novel reminds us, however, that Solomon's mines may be submerged within this text's narrative logic, but his absence in this text cannot be buried so easily.

Southern Africa's Jewish Contexts

WHILE HAGGARD'S NOVEL takes up the mystery of Solomon and the legends about the Great Zimbabwe, it never directly accounts for Haggard's choice to replace gold with diamond mines. It is likely that Haggard, as a colonial administrator in southern Africa, knew about European efforts to find gold and Solomon's Golden Ophir. At the same time, Europeans, some of whom were Jewish, were also venturing into southern Africa to find diamonds and make their fortunes in the diamond industry. Thus, several important histories merge in King Solomon's Mines, including Victorian conflations of the ruins at Zimbabwe with King Solomon's Golden Ophir and, as I explain next, the discovery of diamonds in Kimberley which had the unfortunate effect of inspiring animosity toward European Jews who had immigrated to southern Africa.

At the point when the British annexed the cape from the Dutch East India Company in 1806, European Jews living in southern Africa were still officially denied settlement rights in the region, but remained and continued to practice their religion. Having grown and prospered, this population of Jewish people successfully built their first temple in Cape Town in 1841. Milton Shain explains that European gentiles' views of Jews in this period were marked by a “tolerant and liberal ethos of Cape society” (10). The non-Jewish community helped Jews to build synagogues and gave charitable assistance to Russian immigrants fleeing pogroms. Despite the fact that European Jews were granted similar privileges as European non-Jews, all things were not entirely equal. Colonial administrators were still primarily non-Jewish and hints of anti-Jewish sentiments burbled beneath the surface of these apparently calm relations.

The Jewish community changed drastically, however, with an influx of Jewish immi– grants from Russia in response to the pogroms that took place after the death of Tsar Alexander II. Shain explains that this group assumed that they would be welcomed into southern Africa because of the existence of a well-established Jewish community. Yet, “[t]he new arrivals differed from the Anglo-German vanguard in speech, manner, religious customs, and even dress. A relatively homogeneous community was transformed into a motley combination of cultures bound by a common religious heritage” (12). The emergence of an economically disadvantaged class of white people presented certain logistical problems for the imperial agenda that was premised upon a belief in the innate superiority of white-skinned people. If white people, some of whom were Jewish, could be viewed by African natives as poor or degenerate, these Jews undercut the very logic of racial hierarchies on which Britain and others legitimized their presence in Africa. Although this is not the first time that anti-Jewish stereotypes surged, a resurgence during this period is loosely tied to the combination of emerging class differences among Jews living in southern Africa, and the contentious quest for control over the diamond industry. When the new immigrants fled Russia after 1881, a wave of Jew hatred followed. In a relatively short time, the Jewish community became more culturally heterogeneous in terms of class and cultural markers and grew more compartmentalized both within the Jewish community and in relation to the simultaneous immigration of non-Jewish European settlers.

As the Jewish community diversified, it was increasingly seen by non-Jews for its racial degeneracy, as witnessed by poor Russian immigrants, and alternately for its economic success in the field of diamond speculation and mining. Although the first diamond to be discovered by Europeans was in 1867, it was the discovery two years later of another diamond called “The Star of South Africa” that instigated the diamond boom. This diamond, bought by the Jewish financier Martin Lilienfeld, sold for 11,200 pounds, and was estimated to be an 83 1/2 -carat diamond (Herrman 227). Lilienfeld was the first of several diamond merchants to compete successfully for control over the diamond market. Indeed, Jewish financiers, speculators, traders, and buyers were so prominent in Kimberley that Sir Ernest Oppenheimer maintained, “Jews are Diamonds” (Aschman 121). By 1881, businesses in southern Africa, whether they were owned by Jews or gentiles, shut down on major Jewish holidays such as Yom Kippur. In response to this fact, J. A. Hobson notes that “not Hamburg, not Vienna, not Frankfort, but Johannesburg is the New Jerusalem” (190). Numerous lists of prominent Jewish financiers appear in historical accounts attesting to a surge in Jewish diamond businesses in Kimberley. In fact, one early visitor to the region, Charles A. Payton, explained that from as early as 1870–71, “[f]irst and [f]oremost amongst the ranks of diamond buyers on the South African Fields must certainly be placed the German Jews. There are very few Englishmen amongst them” (Rosenthal 109). Although Jewish people have a long history of participating in the diamond trade, the surge of diamond merchants in Kimberley in this period led to a growing intensity of resentment and anti-Semitism. This was true not only of the famously successful merchants, such as Barney Barnato, the Rothschilds, Lilienfeld, and Alfred Beit, but also of those who had arrived poor, and who hoped, like non-Jewish European immigrants, that they would make their fortune in diamonds. The general manager of the standard bank, Lewis Michell remarked in response to the surge of eastern European Jewish immigrants after 1881:

This tension appeared even before 1881, however, beginning in 1874 when most of the upper layers of earth had been sifted through, and now, lying beneath, was hard rock. Many feared that this signaled the end of diamonds. Barney Barnato, however, suspected that many more diamonds were waiting to be discovered. Raised in London, Barnato moved to Kimberley with the intention of making his fortune in the diamond trade. He turned out to be among very few speculators who predicted accurately that more stones would be found. Around this time, diamonds were flooding the market and diamond sellers, including Barnato and Rhodes, though that the market needed to be regulated. After the stock market was established, Kimberley was run by more consolidated, larger firms. Kanfer notes of this shift: “The day of the little fish was over; Kimberley had entered the age of the sharks. It was only a question of which predator would remain alive at the end of the feeding frenzy” (87). Gradually it became clear that defeating the Jews in the quest to control the diamond industry was an opportunity not only to assert British economic power, but also a step in asserting racial superiority–a chance for the British men not only to rule over the mines, but by association, over those, like Haggard's King Solomon, who tried and failed to control the diamond mines.

Cecil Rhodes stands as one of the better examples of this perspective. In addition to money and power, Rhodes had great plans of spreading Englishness throughout the world. As he explained of his imperial designs, “Africa is still lying ready for us and it is our duty to take it…more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race more of the best the most human, most honorable race the world possesses” (qtd. in Flint 31). Despite his plans, it wasn't until later that Rhodes overtook Barnato. As John Flint explains, by 1885, “when Rhodes could boast an income of 50,000 pounds a year, Barnato's was 200,000 pounds” (47). Barnato's leading role in the newly emerging industry did not win him favors from Kimberley residents. The mining engineer Gardner Williams's comparison of Barnato and Rhodes reveals much about the racialized climate in Kimberley at this time:

This habit of sitting moodily on buckets may have led Rhodes to believe that the only way to beat Barnato would be with an alternate source of Jewish money, which he found with Alfred Beit. Rhodes's choice to collude with Beit proved to be economically and politically savvy. Flint explains of Beit, “Coming from a rich and sophisticated European Jewish family, he had an entrée to important financial connections in Hamburg, Paris, Amsterdam and London, even to the great banking house of Rothschild” (48). Thus, while Beit and Rhodes controlled almost all of the De Beers mines, Barnato still maintained control of the mines in Kimberley (Herrman 230). Prior to arriving in southern Africa in 1875, ten years before the publication of King Solomon's Mines, Beit was already well established in the diamond buying trade. Herrman maintains that Beit was “to display a genius for finance equal to that of Rhodes” (230). Although these three men were among the most powerful in Kimberley of the early 1880s, numerous other Jewish merchants were prominent contenders in the race for control over the diamond trade. Herrman explains: Clearly, Haggard's association of southern African diamonds with Jewish men is historically grounded. However, the manner in which he produces that character, King Solomon, and the implied suggestion of his hoarding of diamonds, as well as the necessity of having English men rescue those diamonds by penetrating his sexualized mine-space, recall a pervasive history of racism evoked by the allusion to Solomon. I show in the next section that Haggard's depiction of Solomon as a failed empire builder helps sustain the illusion of British racial supremacy over Jewish people. Like Solomon, Beit and Barnato may have money and other resources for getting the diamonds, but it is the English whom Haggard imagines gaining control and power over both African and Jewish resources. This connection between empire and racism is perhaps most explicit in Rhodes's will, dated September 19, 1877. In this document Rhodes underscores not only the economic advantages of empire, but the racial ideology implicit in that economy, as he explains that upon his death, all of his money should go: The extension of the British Empire, which Rhodes reasoned could be accomplished with this “Secret Society,” was a mark of national excellence and Anglo-Saxon superiority over all other people–including rich Jews who unwittingly or not, in the case of Beit, enabled the proliferation of this ideology. While Rhodes succeeded in beating Barney Barnato and in spreading imperialism and whiteness in Africa, all of this was possible because of his cleverly devised union with Beit and his ultimate financial backing from the Rothschilds.

Haggard's novel clearly draws from his contemporary history during which time the ruins at Zimbabwe were thought to have belonged to King Solomon and when Cecil Rhodes beat the Jews in his quest to control diamonds by arranging financial backing from the Jewish Rothschild family. We read King Solomon's Mines, then, not only as an imperial allegory, but also as a direct commentary upon the struggle that took place between the major Jewish and English players in Kimberley's diamond boom.

Haggard's Jewish-African Diamonds

HAGGARD EPITOMIZED the struggles young aristocratic English men faced as they sought to maintain their elite status in a country that had run out of room for them. Born in 1856, the eighth of ten children and the sixth son of Anglican parents, Haggard could not depend upon the security of an inheritance. In a culture where the signs of racial degeneration were measured by class position, as well as profession, skin color, ear shape, place of birth, sexual orientation, and religious preference, falling from upper-class status had grave consequences.¹¹

To complicate matters, Haggard's father thought him unusually dim-witted which anguished Haggard, first, by his father's opinion of his intelligence, and second, by his fear that his enfeebled mind was the result of a blood flaw–due to his having a Jewish great-grandmother.¹²

Haggard's interest in bloodlines and race, though a common preoccupation among Victorians, certainly took root in his own family's narratives about their origins. Haggard's father, William Meybohm Rider Haggard, was the son of William Haggard and Elizabeth Meybohm, who was originally of German Jewish descent. Lilias Rider Haggard (H. Rider Haggard's daughter), describes her grandfather as having

Anne McClintock explains that these facial features were not merely points of inherited interest, but were, for Haggard, “the inherited reminders of the debility that flowed in the family veins” (237). This “Jewish blood” was not the only source of “debility” in Rider Haggard's bloodline. Lilias Rider Haggard recalls that the Amyand family blood line, the paternal side of the family, was also perceived curiously by members of the family as “[w]ayward, wild, excitable and brilliant, with more than a hint of mental instability” (Cloak 24). Haggard's anxiety about his family blood was no incidental preoccupation for him, but, as my reading shows, found expression in his fictional representations of Africans and Jews.¹³

After failing the army entrance examination in 1874, Haggard finally attained a position in southern Africa the following year, working with Henry Bulwer who was then lieutenant governor of Natal. On May 24, 1877, on Queen Victoria's birthday and in a ceremony celebrating the British annexation of the Transvaal, Haggard was the one chosen to raise the British flag at Pretoria, an event he describes in a letter to his father with great pride, stating that it was an “act without parallel…. Twenty years hence it will be a great thing to have hoisted the Union Jack over the Transvaal for the first time” (qtd. in Ellis 57). Later the same year, Haggard was appointed master of the court in the Transvaal. This begins Haggard's long affiliation with colonial politics in southern Africa–a subject rarely far from his novel writing. In 1879 Haggard returned to England, met Louisa Margitson, and married the following year. After Haggard and his new wife moved back to southern Africa in 1880, Haggard grew frustrated and ashamed of the manner in which the British botched imperial politics there. He ultimately returned to England with the intention of studying law and to begin his career as a popular novelist. The year he wrote and published King Solomon's Mines, he also joined the bar.¹⁴

While Haggard may have been discreet about his “Jewish blood,” he was surprisingly quite vocal about his anti-Semitism. Wendy Katz notes that negative fictional portrayals of Jews stem from his own anxiety about what he perceived to be a Jewish threat to the world and, more specifically, to the British empire. Katz explains:

It seems likely that Haggard justified his hatred of Jews by associating them exclusively with capitalists. This explains the link in King Solomon's Mines between the greedy King Solomon and the numerous references in the novel to Kimberley–the very site of racial tension between European Jews and non-Jews for control over the diamond mines. Tom Pocock qualifies Haggard's anti-Semitism by maintaining that Haggard saw “the Jews as an heroic race that had been dispossessed by being too clever and ambitious for their own good; his admiration for the early tribal leaders was reduced by his dislike of any modern man who made money by its manipulation” (154). The mercenary spirit of British imperialism seems to have been lost on Haggard; while the novel imagines Jewish economic interests as a sign of greed, British men are conceived as noble and brave when they pursue the very same interests. Pocock's point, however, is striking as he suggests that it is modern Jewish men who inform Haggard's opinions of “early tribal leaders.”

Throughout his career as both colonial administrator and writer, Haggard's anger toward and fear of Jews are two sources of his dedication to the British imperial project. While his pre-war fiction, such as King Solomon's Mines and She, subtly allude to his opinions of Jewish people, Haggard's later fiction reveals a more fully fermented anti-Semitism. In his diaries he blamed the Russian Revolution and the terrible state of Germany on Jews. In 1923, he wrote, “All Germans must undergo terrible suffering except for the ‘magnates’ and the horrible Teutonic Jews who sit like spiders in Berlin, Vienna and elsewhere, and suck out the life-blood of the unhappy peoples that they have got into their net” (qtd. in Katz 151). Indeed, not only did Haggard perceive Jews as a threat in Germany and Russia, but in 1920 Haggard writes that “Jews are a significant threat to the [British] empire” (Katz 150). This concern explains why Solomon's diamonds must not only be taken, but also why their possession by English men is essential to the security of the British imperial project in southern Africa. “Jewish” diamonds are not just a sign of economic prosperity in this novel, but are also the symbol of a precarious British power base that is supported by the noble efforts of three English men who accomplish their task, in part, by overtaking and undercutting Jewish economic power.

Haggard's revision of Solomonic history complies with Victorian theories about the racial superiority of white-skinned people over dark-skinned people, and of Christian racial supremacy over Hebrews/Jews. Solomon's double identity as both other (because he is a Jew) and same (because he is imagined to be a white man) raises several problems in this narrative about white male regeneration. Since he cannot speak for himself, the novel appropriates Solomon in two ways: first, Solomon becomes the source of British wealth, and second, Quatermain uses his own knowledge of the Old Testament to present Solomon's identity from the perspective of Christian history.¹⁵

Indeed, Quatermain even masks the fictional quality of his narrative by calling it a “history,” adding that one of his reasons for writing is his fierce devotion to the Old Testament and the Ingoldsby Legends (11; ch. 1). We are reminded here of the manner in which Jewish history has already been overtaken and appropriated by the Christian Old Testament–a text that enables Quatermain to recognize and interpret the artifacts he finds in Solomon's cave. In the novel's conclusion, when the three men escape from the mines, the orifices through which they enter and emerge disappear as if the caves never existed at all. The only evidence left to attest to King Solomon's identity are the objects and narratives that have been appropriated and re-contextualized–the diamonds in the Englishmen's pockets and Haggard's novel.

The narrative logic of King Solomon's Mines rests upon a moral problem in one of the final scenes of the novel. The three English adventurers, after having entered the cave, find themselves trapped in the mines with diamonds in their pockets. Haggard manages to inspire in his readers a desire for the success of the three imperial thieves, despite, or perhaps because of, their greed. The frontier mentality and get-rich-quick stories that flourished throughout the 1870s and 1880s with regard to the discovery of diamonds, as well as the subsequent mining frenzy, help to contextualize a scene that might otherwise be read as a sign of imperial guilt. Yet, historical context does not go far enough to eradicate the moral conundrum the adventurers face when they steal Solomon's diamonds. We are told early in the tale that the real cause for this journey is the recovery of a lost brother. Thus, it is not greed, but brotherly responsibility and concern that propel these men into the dangerous African wild on their rescue mission. The diamonds are then framed as just recompense for their selflessness in pursuing this lost brother.

The lost brother story begins, however, in the middle of another story, in which diamond mines have been discovered in Kimberley, and white men from all over the world venture to the region with hopes of making a fortune. Apparently unlike these men, the narrator Allan Quatermain visits Kimberley with hopes of selling–of all things–ivory. Upon his return, he meets Sir Henry Curtis and Captain John Good, two English men who solicit Quatermain's help in finding Curtis's brother, George, whom they suspect of having set “off for South Africa in the wild hope of making a fortune” (20; ch. 1). Turning to his new friends, Quatermain recalls two accounts he has heard over the years that, he hopes, will shed light on George's whereabouts. The first is a narrative from a man named Evans. Quatermain explains:

This passage is striking in its suggestion of the interchangeability of the Ophir of the Bible and the treasures of Jewish or Phoenician adventurers whom the Victorians (mistakenly) believed lived in this region. Quatermain's later description of King Twala and the Kukuana people lends credence to the suspicion that Solomon's temple exists in the region, since, after all, King Twala is so strikingly similar to Solomon. Evans asks the young Quatermain if he has ever heard of “Suliman's Mountains” and when Quatermain says no, Evans continues: Quatermain explains that this story was laughable at the time when he heard it, “for the diamond fields were not discovered then” (23; ch. 2). But, as his narration makes clear, his entire frame of reference, his whole manner of conceiving the quest for King Solomon's mines, is rooted in his earlier experiences visiting the Kimberley diamond mines. In alluding to the Victorian preoccupation with proving the myth of a source of whiteness in Africa, this passage also suggests that the wizards' greatness and knowledge comes from their contact with white people–Jews or Phoenicians. Later, Gagool's evil witchery harkens back to Quatermain's claims that these people, the Zulus, while once finer and bigger and brighter, have since lapsed into barbarism. While contact with white people gave them access to diamonds, thousands of years of living in Africa, this novel reasons, have undone the effects of that exposure.

Quatermain continues with this narrative thread by recalling his later meeting with José Silvestre who attempted to search for Solomon's diamonds with a three-hundred-year-old map from his relative José da Silvestra. On his death bed, he gives this map to Quatermain. The map not only seems to verify Evans's story, but also suggests that this myth is ancient, and not a recent product of diamond-mining adventurers. According to da Silvestra's note, which he attaches to the map, whoever is strong enough to survive the desert and mountains will become “the richest king since Solomon” (27; ch. 2). When Quatermain mentions these Jewish or Phoenician earlier adventurers, and then a few pages later refers to the fact that the wagon he purchases for his journey is “not quite a new one, having been to the Diamond Fields and back” (37; ch. 3), he begins the narrative pattern of weaving together popular constructions of Solomonic history with a contemporary history of diamond mining in Kimberley.

In a later scene, when the adventurers see the three statues called the “Silent Ones” (202; ch. 15) just outside the cave, one of their guides, named Ignosi, explains, “There, too, is a great pit, which, at some time, long-dead men dug out, mayhap for the stones ye speak of, such as I have heard men in Natal speak of at Kimberley” (202; ch. 15). When they do finally discover the pit, and Quatermain observes that Sir Henry and Good do not recognize it, he asserts, “‘Then it is clear that you have never seen the diamond mines at Kimberley. You may depend on it that this is Solomon's Diamond Mine; look there,…the formation is the same. I'll be bound that if we went down there we should find ‘pipes’ of soapy brecciated rock’” (207; ch. 16). Although Evans's story and da Silvestra's note and map certainly add power and mystique to the myth of King Solomon's mines, the recognition of Solomonic history for this narrator happens when he finally discovers Solomon's diamonds, which he recognizes only because they resemble those he witnessed earlier in Kimberley.

Evans's uncertainty about whether Jewish or Phoenician miners were responsible for digging up the diamonds becomes clear when the three adventurers discover gold pieces which, the narrator explains, were “of a shape that none of us had seen before, and with what looked like Hebrew characters stamped upon them” (222–23; ch. 17). Jewish money functions here as proof that the mines are Solomonic; simultaneously, it alludes to a nineteenth-century race discourse that aligned racial and linguistic categorization. Sander Gilman explains that throughout much of European history, it was “the language of the Jews, and the books written in this language, that mythically defined the boundary between Christian and Jew” (Jewish Self-Hatred 23). The hidden language of Hebrew was a sign, not only that “Jews speak differently from Christians but [that] they think differently” as well (Jewish Self-Hatred 24). Nancy A. Harrowitz adds that during this period “language was overdetermined as the most important demarcation of the radical split between Christianity and Judaism, the location of fundamental theological differences” (47). These theological differences, translated into cultural and racial determinants, helped verify the logic of Solomon's constructed racial difference, which is made explicit by his compulsion to hide his treasures in the earth. Haggard's inclusion of gold coins at this point in the narrative helps to substantiate the popular myth of Jewish greed and degenerate Jewish racial/linguistic identity.

The tension builds once the adventurers make their way inside the cave. Gagool mumbles sinister comments under her breath and giggles quietly to herself, but the men seem not to notice or care. After admitting that he is “familiar with the Old Testament,” (208–09; ch. 16) Quatermain recalls suddenly that “Solomon went astray after strange gods, the names of three of whom I remembered–‘Ashtoreth the goddess of the Zidonians, Chemosh the god of the Moabites, and Milcom the god of the children of Ammon’– and I suggested to my companions that the three figures before us might represent these false divinities” (209; ch. 16). Sir Henry, whom Quatermain qualifies as “a scholar, having taken a high degree in classics at college” (209; ch. 16), describes the three statues in relation to Biblical, Greek, and, finally, English history:

This echoing question is answered even as it is asked, for the only ones who can say are the three Englishmen: and so they do. As the men move deeper into the cave toward the diamonds, they describe the remains of previous empires in the shape of patriarchs whose bodies have been preserved inside stalactites. To avoid the stigma of passing black African diamonds into white English hands, Haggard transforms this long line of African patriarchs into “the White Dead” (217; ch. 16).

Prior to entering, Quatermain reminds us of his excitement in that moment, “Would it prove a hoax after all, I wondered, or was old da Silvestra right? and were there vast hoards of wealth stored in that dark place, hoards which would make us the richest men in the whole world?” (219; ch. 17). Shortly thereafter Quatermain describes the contents of the treasure chest, as “three-parts full of uncut diamonds, most of them of considerable size” (223; ch.17), adding “I fairly gasped as I dropped them…‘We are the richest men in the whole world…. Monte Cristo is a fool to us”’ (224; ch. 17). He adds later, “we could see by holding them up to the light, [they] were a little yellow, ‘off coloured,’ as they call it at Kimberley” (225; ch. 7). This scene reminds us that the quest for diamonds is not only about mining capital, but also about accumulating more wealth than other men. The impressiveness of finding Solomon's treasure chest, then, is inseparable from the excitement these men feel in comparison to other explorers, Monte Cristo in this case, whose wealth they have now surpassed. This initial excitement turns quickly, however, as Quatermain realizes, “And we stood with pale faces and stared at each other, with the lantern in the middle, and the glimmering gems below, as though we were conspirators about to commit a crime, instead of being, as we thought, the three most fortunate men on earth” (224; ch. 17). Here, Quatermain sets up two positions– those who believe they are committing a crime, and those who believe, as do the English men, that they are fortunate in having discovered this large source of hidden diamonds. Recalling Matthew Arnold's earlier comparison of “Hebraism and Hellenism” in Culture and Anarchy (1867–68), Haggard manages to eradicate imperial guilt by disassociating the adventurers' theft from the logic of “right conduct” espoused by Arnold's interpretation of Hebraic culture. This scene's symbolism of the illuminated Platonic cave invokes the “spontaneity of consciousness” (478) at the heart of Arnold's Hellenic formulation. The English men's “pale” faces illuminated by the fire from their lantern enable them to re-frame their guilt. Accordingly, the Greek reference not only transforms this space from a Hebrew into a Hellenic or Platonic cave, but in so doing, transforms the theft into a reclamation of what belongs to the English men because of their familial connection to the Greeks. Thus, symbolically they are not stealing from a Jewish other, but reclaiming the diamonds from their Greek ancestors. The tension invoked by Quatermain's guilt, obviously inspired from this Hebraic history, dissipates when he imagines that the diamonds are not only there for the taking, but have been stored by ancient cultures who anticipated this moment when English men would liberate them. Quatermain exclaims wondrously:

This moment of resolution helps to submerge the real problem of imperial theft by suggesting that the English men are supposed to take the diamonds since Solomon, in anticipation of their arrival, “found” and “stored” them “for us.”

In their excitement, the adventurers do not see the trap Gagool sets, or “the look of fearful male-violence that old Gagool favoured [as] she crept, crept like a snake, out of the treasure chamber and down the passage towards the massive door of solid rock” (225; ch. 17). While others have read this cave space as the body of Sheba which the white men enter and from which they steal the very objects (diamonds) that engender their wealth, I suggest that the rape that takes place ought not to be read as exclusively heterosexual. The anxiety at the root of this quest appears in this scene as the men realize they are about to be trapped inside the figurative body of Solomon, or “the dark passage” (220; ch. 17) as Quatermain calls it. At the same time, Gagool's evil intentions also play a role in obviating their guilt. Thus, readers can feel relief when the English men survive the ordeal of entrapment and escape at a point when they have apparently forgotten about the diamonds in their pockets. Low points out that, “[B]y confronting the possibility of death in the cave, and through the exhibition of great courage and fortitude, Haggard's heroes can emerge from the treasure quest with their moral integrity intact” (79). Therefore, homosocial desire is shrouded in the end by their exit from the cave (and the cave's disappearance) and the erasure of their desire to enter into “that dark place” (219; ch. 17). The only way to redeem themselves for having been duped by Gagool is to transfer the sentiment to Solomon. When they take his diamonds, Solomon is not only figuratively raped, but overtaken in the competition to control African diamonds. Once the English men exit the mines, Solomon's remaining diamonds are forever buried in the earth when–due to a rush of mud caused by a rain storm–the cave's orifices collapse. Haggard's adventurers are symbolically born from the Jewish Temple remains that naturally disappear, carrying diamonds that belong to a dead Jewish king. The diamonds are then transplanted back to England where they secure the class positions of the three adventurers.

Recent Haggard criticism has been particularly attentive to the larger implications of Haggard's representations of Africa and the erasure of African subjectivities. Although it would be wrong to suggest that Haggard's perspective on race is unmediated by the novel form in general or the adventure tale in particular, critical discussions tend to focus on the impact of his representations of empire as they intersect with Victorian race, gender, and class ideologies. For example, in Imperial Leather, McClintock maintains that the feminized landscape (Sheba's breasts) must not only be navigated and conquered, but women's reproductive power in colonial space must be subsumed by white, western, male power, and finally fetishized in the process of conferring patriarchal power to second sons. Accordingly, Haggard's choice to present diamonds in this novel in isolation from African women's labor means that diamonds appear to have dug up themselves. Money then, “breed[s] itself–just as in Haggard's tale the men give birth to themselves in the mine-womb” (257). Laura Chrisman offers an alternative to McClintock's reading by maintaining that “Acquiring diamonds, Haggard tries to suggest, is as self-evidently ‘natural’ as male domination over women…. Sexuality…functions as a means of resolving contradictions within the text's political economy” rather than, as McClintock has argued, as a means of “constituting its economic ‘essence”’ (296). While both McClintock and Chrisman are right to read this text's disavowal of women, women's work, and women's bodies, both fail to consider the implications of the fact that these diamonds come from two places at once–Sheba's womb and King Solomon's temple remains.

Building on Chrisman's point that fantasy novels ought not to be read as merely “unmediated transcript of colonial administrative activities” (294), I suggest that we recognize one absent subjectivity invoked in King Solomon's Mines and overlooked by most Haggard criticism–that of King Solomon's male body into which the three English men enter, and from which they exit with diamonds in their trouser pockets. When we read the mines as African female space, these men perform a figurative rape of Sheba's body, symbolized in part by the pigeon egg diamonds they carry out with them which effectively places female generative power into the hands of men. However, as Christopher Lane has pointed out, much Haggard criticism has been attentive to what he sees as an “overdetermined” (57) relationship between the landscape and imperial conquest, women's bodies, and the role of women characters, for, “[n]ot only are women domestic slaves in his fiction, but all non-Caucasian races are stereotypically feminized as weak, unruly, and in need of discipline” (57). Lane adds later, “it may not be enough to literalize colonization as a heterosexual act or to represent the landscape/object of this penetration as irremediably ‘other”’ (64). If we see these men penetrating the body of King Solomon, as opposed to the body of Sheba, then the maternal figure doesn't disappear, but is transformed into the body of another man. Solomon is not quite feminized as he is emasculated because of his Jewish body and his deviant sexuality. Solomon's imagined hyper-masculine identity, produced in Haggard's novel by references to his seven hundred wives, three hundred concubines, and relations with the Queen of Sheba, necessitates (according to the novel) the act of disciplining him in this way for his crimes of lust and miscegenation.

The novel's subtle allusions to Jewish history in Africa underscore one economic tension invoked by this novel's association of Jewish diamonds and British claims to southern African diamond mines. The fact that this novel's specific historical contexts–the diamond rush in Kimberley and popular/fictional accounts of the Ophir explorations–are made to seem peripheral is not a sign of their insignificance, but rather marks the centrality of the racialized and sexualized tensions which invoke them. This novel's (failed) efforts to diminish or shroud African Jewish history prove to be equally as important as its recovery of that history which takes place once the English men have entered Solomon's space. Haggard's construction of King Solomon as sexual pervert and great empire builder thus underscores the racial implications of Solomon's absence in the text. Haggard renders Solomon's identity as a white man in order to legitimize the three adventurers' claims to African diamonds, and by extension, British imperialism. Paradoxically, Haggard also renders Solomon's identity as a site of difference, which he accomplishes by representing the Jewish king as sexually degenerate and greedy–the combination of which provoke his demise. Hinged upon Solomon's constructed whiteness, then, is the justification for and the distinction between white empires in Africa. When we remember, however, that Solomon had gold mines, not diamonds mines, and that he would have had dark, Middle-Eastern or African colored skin, we begin to understand the necessity of, and anxiety about, constructing Solomon's whiteness in the assertion of Anglo-Saxon Englishness as a racial category. As Low explains, “racial discrimination depends on visible difference” (226), and since Solomon's imagined white skin cannot distinguish him without undercutting English masculinity, his sexuality must be constructed as a site of difference. In the process, Solomon is narratively rendered absent, fetishized by his diamonds, and depicted by his hidden, cavernous body. In contrast, English masculine identity asserts itself by writing this history, not of Solomon, but of Solomon's absence.

The system of representations of Jewish history from which imperial consciousness and the corresponding supremacist ideologies emerge in this text are based on both English anxiety about making racial distinctions between black and white people, as well as distinguishing between white-skinned Europeans and white-skinned Jews. Haggard's imagined version of Solomonic history and his ideological uses of that history in King Solomon's Mines reveal much about the larger implications of this discourse in the production of English, Christian, masculine, heterosexual identity. In the process, however, we begin to understand the work of Semitic discourse that paradoxically aligns and separates Jewish history and English history by that very discourse. If, as this novel suggests, Solomonic history would remain undiscovered without the three English adventurers, then the same is true of the three English adventurers, whose history could not be told without Haggard's Jewish diamonds.