Prayer Book for the Entire Year, Yiddish Manuscript on paper [Rhineland, perhaps Eltville or Mainz: ca. 1560]

145 leaves (7 3/4 x 6 in.; 198 x 154 mm). Written in black and brown ink on sixteenth century watermarked paper (Briquet 146, 5048) in an Ashkenazic semi-cursive Yiddish script; incipits in square Hebrew script; rubrication on ff. 141r-v. collation: 1⁴, 2-18⁸, 19⁵=145 leaves. Text complete save for four leaves (two preceding f.1 and two between f.4-5). Vertically ruled in pencil; catchwords on recto at lower margin center, though most cropped or shaved; modern foliation in pencil. Some fraying to fore-edges in first dozen leaves; staining and soiling throughout; some dampstaining at margins. Repair to lower corner of f.12, affecting a few words. Modern front and rear free endpapers; original sixteenth century pastedown endpapers, with owners' notes, front and rear, now detached but present. Original half roll-tooled leather over beech boards (leather perished on rear, detached board); brass catchplates, straps perished, cords reinforced on text block. Worn.

Gutele, daughter of Jacob Ullman; Solomon son of Isaac Ephraim: inscriptions on detached pastedown endpapers. 

Khone Shmeruk, Yiddish Literature: Aspects of its History (Hebrew), Tel-Aviv University: 1978.

an extremely rare 16th century manuscript of an old yiddish translation of the prayer book; one of the earliest surviving complete Yiddish literary texts in existence.

This extremely rare 16th century manuscript of a complete Old Yiddish translation of the Siddur (Prayer Book) for the entire year according to the Western Ashkenazi rite, contains prayers and ritual practices (minhagim) for weekdays, Shabbat, the New Moon and festivals and also includes Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers), the Passover Haggadah, and "Hoshanot" for the seven days of Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles. The text is entirely in Yiddish, excluding the initial words which are quoted in Hebrew.

The Yiddish in this manuscript preserves elements of contemporary regional dialects of Yiddish or Old German which have been partly or entirely lost in modern Yiddish. The often peculiar orthography or spelling of Yiddish words in this manuscript reflects an early tradition not preserved elsewhere.

The present manuscript is one of the earliest Yiddish translations of the Siddur. In general, surviving translations of Hebrew prayers into Old Literary Yiddish are very few; only four manuscripts have been documented in the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts, three of them much later copies in later Yiddish dialects and only one, a different translation reflecting a different dialect is contemporary with the present manuscript. Indeed, this Siddur is one of the earliest surviving complete Yiddish literary texts in existence.

Yiddish translations of prayers were often prepared for use by women, usually belonging to affluent families, and it seems probable that this manuscript was also written for a woman. Indeed, an owner's inscription at the beginning of the manuscript indicates that one of the owners seems to have been the daughter of a wealthy family.

This manuscript, long held in a private collection, is unknown to scholars of the Yiddish language or of the Ashkenazic liturgy and ritual. Upon a more thorough examination by scholars in the appropriate disciplines, it promises to significantly enrich our knowledge of the history of the Yiddish language and of Ashkenazic (Judeo-German) culture as a whole.

The manuscript has been localized to the Alsace-Lorraine/Rhineland regions on the basis of both its distinctive paleography as well as by the presence of several watermarks which point decidedly to this geographic area as well as to a temporal range between 1553-1564. Complete information on the watermarks as well as on the unique orthographic and linguistic characteristics of the manuscript are available in reports prepared by Dr. Benjamin Richler and Shlomo Zucker, of the National Library of Israel.