Nusach Ashkenaz

Jewish statutory prayer is everywhere the same in skeleton, the Shema with its blessings, the Amidah, the public reading of the Torah, and everywhere different in flesh. The wording of the blessings varies in small persistent ways, the poems admitted into the service differ, the order of certain passages diverges, and the melodies belong to each community's own musical dialect. Such a settled configuration is a nusach, and Nusach Ashkenaz is the configuration the Jews of medieval Germany and northern France made and their descendants carried across the world.

Liturgical historians, following the lines drawn by scholarship since Leopold Zunz and consolidated in Elbogen's great history, trace the statutory Jewish rites to two ancient parents, the rite of the land of Israel and the rite of Babylonia, and read Nusach Ashkenaz as the branch that kept the most Palestinian material: readings, wordings and above all the enormous corpus of piyyut composed in the land of Israel and cherished in the Rhineland long after the Babylonian geonim had tried to prune it. The rite's framework was nonetheless the Babylonian order that all medieval Jewry accepted, transmitted through the prayer books of Amram Gaon and Saadia. What the Rhineland added was its own record of custom, minhag, elevated almost to law: books such as the Maharil's fixed not only texts but the very tunes, the mi-Sinai melodies for the Days of Awe that Ashkenazi cantors still regard as untouchable.

Nusach Ashkenaz grew two branches as Ashkenazi Jewry itself moved. The western branch, minhag Ashkenaz in the narrow sense, remained the rite of the old German communities, of Frankfurt above all, whose punctilious liturgical conservatism became proverbial; the eastern branch, minhag Polin, developed among the Jews of Poland and Lithuania, differing in dozens of details of text and selection though not in structure. Both branches faced their great modern rival from within: from the eighteenth century the Hasidic movement adopted a modified rite, Nusach Sefard, that folded Lurianic and Sephardic elements into the Ashkenazi base, and prayer-rite became a marker of allegiance in every town the movement touched, with Lithuanian opposition and German orthodoxy holding to the old nusach as a point of identity. The migrations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries carried all the branches together to America, Britain and eventually Israel, where standard printed siddurim smoothed many local differences while the fundamental division of rites persists in every synagogue's bookshelf.

The destruction of European Jewry gave the old regional distinctions a memorial weight: the Frankfurt rite or the customs of Worms are now maintained by communities in Jerusalem, New York and Bnei Brak as acts of continuity with a murdered world, and the study of Ashkenazi liturgy has become in part a work of preservation, with the nusach itself the most portable monument the Rhineland communities left.