Feeding the Eternal City: Jewish and Christian Butchers in the Roman Ghetto. By Kenneth Stow. Cambridge, MA; London, UK: Harvard University Press, 2024. ix + 276 pp. $45.00 hardback

This review examines Kenneth Stow’s Feeding the Eternal City: Jewish and Christian Butchers in the Roman Ghetto (Harvard University Press, 2024), a study of Jewish-Christian relations in early modern Rome centred on the provisioning and ritual preparation of kosher meat. The review highlights Stow’s analysis of the complex interplay between religious observance, economic pragmatism, institutional regulation, and communal autonomy within the Roman ghetto. Particular attention is given to the forms of cooperation between Jewish and Christian butchers, whose economic interdependence coexisted with legal restrictions, conflict, and mutual suspicion. The review also considers the book’s extensive use of Jewish, rabbinic, notarial, and papal sources, as well as its methodological combination of microhistorical analysis and broader reflections on acculturation, papal power, and the boundaries of confessional societies. Finally, it situates Stow’s findings within recent scholarship on Jewish mobility and the negotiation of Jewish presence in the Papal States, emphasizing how economic practices could create spaces of interaction and agency even within highly regulated environments.