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.