Kenneth Stow’s Feeding the Eternal City offers an exploration of Jewish-Christian relations in early modern Rome through the lens of a particular aspect, the meat provisioning. At first glance, the subject might appear narrow – kosher slaughter, tax systems, butcher guilds – but it becomes a revealing case study of religious negotiation, economic pragmatism, and institutional entanglement within the unique setting of the Roman ghetto.

Building on decades of work on Roman Jewish history (Taxation, Community, and State, 1982; Theater of Acculturation, 2001; Jewish Life in Early Modern Rome, 2007), Stow continues to demonstrate his familiarity with both rabbinic and papal sources. In this new contribution, he turns to the daily realities of food and faith, showing how the supply of kosher meat became a crucial site of interaction – and contention – between Jewish and Christian communities. Far from simply chronicling the regulations around dietary laws, Stow’s study shows a complex web of cooperation and tension, institutional oversight, and everyday pragmatism.

The introduction – framed around the case of Anna del Monte, a young Jewish woman forcibly held in the Casa dei Catecumeni in 1749, and already examined by Stow (Anna and Tranquillo, 2017) – immediately establishes the stakes of the book: to preserve Jewish identity in a hostile environment meant, among other things, to uphold the strict rules of kasherut. Eggs and meat become more than food items; they are signifiers of spiritual resilience and communal integrity. This opening sets the tone for the rest of the volume, which explores how meat, especially kosher meat, shaped not only Jewish religious life but also broader social and political dynamics in Rome.

Organized thematically rather than chronologically, the book moves across three centuries (sixteenth to nineteenth centuries) to reveal enduring patterns of conflict and accommodation. Chapters examine everything from tax structures (such as the polpina) to ritual slaughter practices (shecḥitah and niqqur), from papal dispensations to legal disputes between butchers. While each chapter focuses on specific issues – legal frameworks, communal oversight, collaboration, and fraud – Stow draws the reader back to larger historiographical questions: how did Jews manage to maintain their religious norms in a city governed by canon law? And what does this tell us about the boundaries (and porosities) of early modern confessional societies?

One of the book’s central contributions lies in its treatment of Jewish–Christian collaboration. While many scholars have framed the ghetto as a space of exclusion or segregation, Stow emphasizes the necessity of daily cooperation, especially between Jewish and Christian butchers. These relationships were pragmatic rather than sentimental, driven by the need to divide labor and share resources. Christians provided the animals, purchased the hindquarters forbidden to Jews, and in some cases even worked directly in the ghetto. Jews, for their part, performed the ritual slaughter and complied with intricate rules of porging (the removal of forbidden fats and the sciatic nerve). These interactions, as Stow suggests, were not simply tolerated exceptions but fundamental to the functioning of the Roman meat economy.

Stow does not romanticize this collaboration. He speaks of “tense intimacy” to describe a relationship in which trust and dependence coexisted with suspicion and latent hostility. Legal cases, street altercations, and intermittent bans on interreligious trade remind us of the fragility of this coexistence. Yet the fact that the butchers of the ghetto appear alongside their Christian colleagues in joint petitions and public protests speaks volumes about the strength – and necessity – of their alliances. In this regard, Stow’s analysis resonates with recent Italian scholarship on Jewish mobility and the negotiation of presence across the Papal States – including the works of Andreoni, Bartolucci, Caffiero, Di Nepi, and Maifreda – by showing how even the most regulated and confined spaces, such as the ghetto, could become arenas of tactical agency and pragmatic interaction. In particular, the provisioning of kosher meat resonates with similar patterns observed in the production of kosher wine and cheese, or in the context of regional fairs, which likewise enabled Jews in the Papal States to spend time outside the ghetto despite formal restrictions on residence.

One of the book’s strengths lies in its extensive use of archival sources. Drawing on notarial registers, communal minute books, rabbinic responsa, and papal decrees, Stow reconstructs the connections between religious practice, commercial activity, and civic regulation. His engagement with unpublished materials from the Archivio Storico Capitolino and the Roman Jewish Community Archive, along with his long-standing work on Jewish notarial records (Notai ebrei), provides a solid documentary basis. Although the loss of the Christian butchers’ confraternity records constitutes a significant limitation, Stow addresses this absence with methodological care, supporting his arguments with verifiable sources.

In methodological terms, the book offers a valuable model for combining microhistorical rigor with broader conceptual implications. Stow constantly weaves the material conditions of meat production – tax burdens, slaughter quotas, disputes over rents and licenses – into larger reflections on Jewish autonomy, papal power, and the mechanics of acculturation. The case of the Roman butchers, caught between canonical immobility and economic interdependence, exemplifies the broader dialectic of constraint and circulation that characterized Jewish life in the early modern Italian peninsula. This dynamic is also explored through comparisons with distant contexts such as medieval Spain, revolutionary France, and contemporary Europe and the United States. Kosher meat, in this sense, was more than a ritual imperative; it served as a mechanism through which the Jewish Universitas asserted its ability to maintain internal cohesion and negotiate externally within a tightly surveilled civic order. This provides a valuable contribution not only to our understanding of the infrastructure of religious life but also to the institutional credibility and adaptability of the Roman Jewish community.