ABSTRACT
This chapter locates a musical crossroads between Europe, the Middle East, and Africa within the setting, mission, structure, and liturgy of the Abbey of Saint Mary of the Resurrection in Abu Ghosh, an Arab-Israeli village on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Abu Ghosh was formerly identified as the biblical Kiryat-Yearim, where the Ark of the Covenant remained “for twenty years” preceding its transfer to Jerusalem, then identified by the Franks as Emmaus, the place of the encounter of Christ with two disciples after his Resurrection. In 1976, a French Benedictine community settled there whose primary mission was to foster Jewish–Christian connections: prayers are sung in Latin, French, and Hebrew. Furthermore, the community’s creative engagement with sacred music, which incorporates the West African kora and Hasidic melodies, is reinforced by the fact that the Abbey is a mixed-gender community of monks and nuns, providing especially complex musical practice in its diversity and in its capacity to reimagine borders. In this respect, liturgical music at Abu Ghosh Benedictine is a promising point of departure for future research on music in Catholic communities, not only in Jerusalem and the Holy Land, but in sites of historical religious encounter across the Mediterranean and beyond.
