As anthropologists describe the increasing normativeness of global movement and the consequent hybridity, creolization, synchronicity and compression of multiculturalism, "diaspora" has become a key tool in the disciplinary armoury. This paper begins from one particular feature in this diasporic accounting, that pertaining to the exilic "Wandering Jew". From an examination of the "Jew" in the discourse of modern nationalism, the paper proceeds to a possible discourse of post-national urbanism, to conclude with an ethnographic account of Jewish lives in the contemporary Canadian milieu of urban Newfoundland. While the idiom of the "Wandering Jew" might say little about the content of actual individual lives, what, nevertheless, might it be said to contain in the way of political prescription? What political message might the notion of universal (Jewish) cosmopolitanism and transnationalism be seen to hold, and how might this ideal type be employed idealistically by anthropology in the cause of cultural critique? From the idiom of the "Wandering Jew", the paper thus proceeds to an outlining of "mutual guesting" as a conceptualization of just social procedures in a new world system.
globalization; post-nationalism; cosmopolitanism; diaspora; Jews; discourse; irony; urbanism; Newfoundland