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 genisa of a Cairo synagogue in 1896, and contains a collection of narrative poems in a variety of Middle High German, but written in Hebrew characters. There remains some controversy about the extent to which the language of this manuscript has moved away from that of every-day German-speakers of the time, but there appears at least to be a consensus that there is a strong Jewish colouring to the language. It follows that these are the oldest known works (apart from a few short inscriptions going back to the 13th century) in the Ashkenazi Jewish vernacular which was later to develop into the Yiddish language.
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.
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 Judaeo hereditatis Germanicae auctori, 2), Tübingen: Niemeyer 1964.
