The Jewish Studies Program is sponsoring a lecture by Professor Kenneth Stow, who will discuss his recent book, “Feeding the Eternal City: Jewish and Christian Butchers in the Roman Ghetto” (2024). The book offers a social history of Rome in the early modern period through the experience of Jewish butchers. Though confined to the ghetto, they not only worked to supply Jewish customers with kosher meats but also sold other portions of animals to Christian butchers. This collaboration helped Jewish and Christian butchers manage cost and supply issues and showed creative ways around the bounds of canon law. Professor Stow will also speak more broadly about experiences of Jewish communities in medieval and Renaissance Europe, particularly papal Rome.

Kenneth Stow received his PhD from Columbia University in 1971, and he is a graduate of the Combined Program of Columbia and the Jewish Theological Seminary. He is Professor of Jewish History Emeritus University of Haifa and has held visiting professorships at Yale, the University of Michigan, The University of Washington, Smith College, The University of Toronto, and the Gregorian Pontifical University in Rome. He was twice a fellow at the Israel Institute for Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He is the author of many books and articles, and he founded the international journal Jewish History, which he edited during a quarter century, through 2012. He has lectured and participated in congresses in the United States, Canada, Europe, Israel, and Buenos Aires.

Currently, he divides his time principally between Haifa and Northampton, MA, with time also in Buenos Aires, and research trips to Italy. He is married to Estela Harretche, Professor of Spanish Literature at Smith College, and has four children and nine grandchildren in Israel.