Ashkenazi religious life has repeatedly produced intense movements of piety. The medieval Hasidei Ashkenaz of the Rhineland cultivated asceticism and mystical prayer, a current Gershom Scholem placed at the head of his history of Jewish mysticism. Lurianic Kabbalah, spreading from Safed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, saturated Ashkenazi liturgy and folk imagination, and left legends like the Golem of Prague, the clay servant attributed to Rabbi Judah Loew, and the dybbuk, the clinging spirit of Yiddish folklore and drama.
In the eighteenth century Podolia, Israel ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov, taught a joyful devotion in which sincere prayer counted for as much as scholarship, and the movement his disciples built, Hasidism, organized itself around the courts of hereditary rebbes. Its opponents, the misnagdim led from Vilna, answered with the great Lithuanian yeshivot, academies of Talmudic analysis whose method still governs traditional study. The quarrel cooled into two enduring styles of Ashkenazi Orthodoxy, both transplanted to Israel and America after the Holocaust, where Hasidic courts such as Chabad and Satmar and the yeshiva world alike rebuilt.
Ashkenaz also produced Judaism's modern denominations: Reform and Conservative Judaism began as German Ashkenazi responses to emancipation, and the Ashkenazi rite, analyzed in Ismar Elbogen's comprehensive history of Jewish liturgy, remains the base text of most synagogues in the English-speaking world.