Nadiia Skokova

Fellows from Ukraine (09/2022-10/2022)

Out of the Urban Roots: The Rural Jews on the Dawn of Modern Politics in East Galicia

The project will extend the understanding of Galizianer, the historical phenomenon which described the Galician Jews whose identity was formed under the Habsburg rule and lost most of its adherents in the Holocaust. Galicia was the region where the Jewish population formed one of the largest Jewish communities in the world with its own specific dynamics. Therefore, the goal of my project is to analyse the phenomenon of rural Jews as a significant part of local national representation.
Based on this goal, I want to confront the central problems of understanding what the traditional Jewish society was. Undermining the history from this perspective I want to reconstruct everyday life of Jews outside their common environment, the shtetls. On the one hand, it reveals to us how rural Jews remained the important ties with religious practices, and on the other hand it shows the multiple ways in which modern politics spread within the Jewish community. Regarding the context, my project will also reveal the level of Jewish-Ukrainian co-existence in the Sub-Carpathian region since the end of the 19th century. It seeks to analyse the social and economic environment of coexistence in the region and rethink the political discourses that made the ethnic antagonism the main feature of national misunderstanding.

Nadiia Skokova is a historian of Modern East and Central Europe at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv with a special interest in issues of mass politics, social changes in modern age, minority politics and cultural transformations. Her Ph.D. thesis is dedicated to the subject of the national and modern transformation of Galician Jews in the interwar period (title: The East Galician Zionist Federation (1918-1929).