Dukus Horant

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Dukus Horant is a 14th-century narrative poem in Judeo-German (Proto-Yiddish).

It is the best known of a number of works which survive in the famous Cambridge Codex T.-S.10.K.22. This manuscript was discovered in the Cairo Geniza in 1896, and contains a collection of narrative poems in a variant of Middle High German, written in Hebrew characters. There is some controversy over the extent to which the manuscript's language differs from the commonly spoken German of the time, but it is agreed there is a strong Jewish colouring to it. Therefore these are the oldest known works (apart from a few short inscriptions dated to the 13th century) in the Ashkenazi Jewish vernacular which later developed into Yiddish.

Dukus Horant is a heroic epic with thematic similarities to the German poem Kudrun. It is thus a good example of the transfer of literary material between the Christian and Jewish communities in the German-speaking lands in the later Middle Ages. The other works in the manuscript contain traditional Jewish material.

A transcription of the full text of the poem can be viewed on the Bibliotheca Augustana website.

[edit] Editions

• L. Fuks, The Oldest Known Literary Documents of Yiddish Literature (c. 1382), Leiden: Brill, 1957.
• P.F.Ganz, F. Norman and W. Schwarz (ed.), Dukus Horant (Altdeutsche Textbibliothek, Ergänzungsreihe 2), Tübingen: Niemeyer 1964.