Das Eposfragment Dukus Horant: ein mittelalterliches Zeugnis deutsch-jüdischer Interkulturalität?

The paper concerns a manuscript discovered in 1896 in the genizah of the Old Synagogue in Cairo. It contains Middle High German and early Yiddish literary texts written in Hebrew alphabet. Among them one may find fragments of the epic Dukus Horant, which, ever since its publication in 1957, has attracted a great deal of academic interest and generated much controversy as regards its place in the medieval tradition of the heroic epic, as well as its linguistic and cultural identity. The present paper discusses the main tendencies in the text’s reception and it also seeks to address the issue of the extent to which Dukus Horant may be treated as an example of inter-cultural transfer between the Jews and the Germans during the Middle Ages.