"Lite" žydiškuose mentaliniuose žemėlapiuose
ENThe current study aims at understanding the boundaries of "Jewish Lithuania," Lite, and its subdivisions, as they were perceived by the Lithuanian Jews (and by Jews outside Lithuania) mainly during the "long nineteenth century" but in order to understand the Jewish mental maps under the tsars we have to cover earlier periods as well. A certain problem of this research is the fact that Jews did not draw geographical maps and did not write travel guides, formulating and transmitting their geographical perceptions and concepts. Therefore the current study is based on written sources dealing with variety of matters, but not geography. Although those sources are random, sometimes unrepresentative and lack consistency, they reveal mental maps of their Jewish authors. Names which Jews used to describe regions (Lite, Zamet, Raysn) had their equivalents in other languages (Litwa, Lietuva, Litva, Żmudź, Samogitia, Rus' etc.) but their geographical scope was not identical. The Jewish mental maps in Lithuania in the "long" nineteenth century were ambiguous, reflecting in various degrees region's historical past, administrative borders, non-Jewish discourses and cultural/religious diversity among the Jews. In a strange way, they sometimes preserved medieval geographical concepts interwoven with newest realities. The term Lite, which was approximately equal to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, became a synonym of Northwestern region of the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century, but never coincided with its exact borders. Until the emergence of the independent Republic of Lithuania in 1918 it was almost never used for referring to the ethnic Lithuania. At the same time, the term Life existed in the narrow sense, describing eastern and southern parts of ethnic Lithuania, western and central parts of ethnic Belarus, and northeastern part of todays' Poland. [...]. [From the publication]
