The Hebrew phraseyimakh shemo יִמַּח שְׁמוֹ is a curse placed after the name of particular enemies of the Jewish people. A variant is yimakh shemo ve zikhro יִמַּח שְׁמוֹ וְזִכְרוֹ. Yimakh shemo is one of the strongest curses in the Hebrew language.
Usage
The term, although Hebrew, may be inserted as a set phrase in languages other than Hebrew, including Yiddish, for example, "Dos iz a kol-boynik, yemakh-shmoy!" and English. When the phrase is used in English of plurals the Hebrew plural -am is applied. The epithet may be abbreviated as "Y. S." in some English texts. In Hebrew the abbreviation is y-sh"u The curse connects with examples of erasure of names in other cultures. It has been called "the classic Jewish curse."
The phrase originates with Purim and Haman, but can be applied to any abhorrent enemy of the people such as Sabbatai Zevi, Spain, Joseph Stalin Russians, Poles, Adolf Hitler, Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele, any other Nazi, or even in cases of personal slight, such as of a bullying father, or conversely as the father of Israel Zangwill of his playwright son. Chofetz Chaim used the epithet of the man who tried to persuade him to abandon his studies. There are only a very small number of texts where yimakh shemo is used of Jesus, although the tradition that Yeshu is related to the yimach shemo has a little popular circulation, this may be an inheritance from medieval polemical traditions. An early introduction of this connection into Lutheran literature was made by convert Johan Kemper.
Although the immediate context of the phrase yimakh shemo vezikhro is related to Haman, some sources suggest that the second part of the phrase "and his memory," harks back to the instruction to "obliterate the memory of Amalek" in Deuteronomy 25:19, and Exodus 17:14. This connection is supported in some sources by the idea that Haman is a descendant of Amalek.
In Yiddish a derived noun, formed with the Slavonic -nik nominalizing suffix, is yemakh-shmoynik "scoundrel" but this is not used with the strength of the original epithet yemakh-shmoy. The term yimakh shemo is often used in combination with the term meshummad from the root shamad, which signifies to destroy. The obliteration of Amalek's memory has been compared to the Latin damnatio memoriae by several European academics.
