The word “hypocrite” is the converted word “chadzy” (haji) that came to us from the Turkish language. The title “Hodge” was awarded to a person who made a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina - sacred to all Muslim cities. Returning from a distant journey made for piety, this pilgrim had the right to put on a white turban - as a sign that he was approaching the holy stone of the Kaaba. Since such people were universally respected in the Islamic world, many wanted to enroll in Haji not in order to get into the holy land, but for the honors with which compatriots would shower them upon their return.
In Russian, the word "hypocrite" had an initially negative meaning. So the Turks called people who revealed excessive piety, overly moralized, taught how to live differently, but in reality turned out to be very far from the ideals of the professed religion. The guardians of morality sometimes turned out to be lecherous and pedophiles, who spoke in the style of extreme Puritanism and rigorism, lived in luxury and excesses.
But the Turks were not the first to discover that piety is feigned. In the Gospels there are many testimonies of those who “pretend to be praying for a long time” for people to see, and those who “see their little knot in the eyes of their neighbor, but do not even notice a log in their oceans”. Jesus called such “holy” “Pharisees”, and proclaimed: “Woe to you!”, Because they cleanse the outside, and inside are full of malice and lawlessness. But "Pharisee" - the former meaning of the word prude, was also originally not synonymous with hypocrisy. This was a class of especially pious, knowledgeable Torah and Talmud rabbis, "scribes." They taught in synagogues, like the Levites.
In English, the prude is bigot, in German, Scheinheiligkeit. As you can see, nothing from the Turkish Khoja or the Gospel Pharisee. However, in the German language there is an indication of religious hypocrisy, false holiness. In Russia, for a long time, the term "holiness" was used in parallel with the "hypocrite", but later it became archaic, and it is known why: the hypocrisy went beyond the plane of religion and moved into the field of decency, mores, in a word, into the sphere of secular ethics.
If we analyze literary works where hypocritical heroes act (Tartuffe by Moliere, Life by Maupassant, Khanushka by Kuprin, Thunderstorm by Ostrovsky and other works of the New Time, we will see that the hypocrite is a completely secular person who claims to be the guardian of the purest Puritan morals and the standard of morality.
Interestingly, in the Western and American tradition, the word bigot is inextricably associated with racism and rejection of same-sex marriage. So in the conditions of a “politically correct society” the term “hypocrite” was transformed: this is the person who will prove with foam in his mouth that he is not racist and respects the rights of gays and lesbians, while he would rather kill his daughter than allow her to marry black man or marry a girl. American society knows many rigorists who advocate that, from Tom Sawyer’s Adventures, he censor the words “Negro” and prohibit Shakespeare’s play “Venetian Merchant, ” because the politically incorrect word “Jew” is found there, and in fact they refer to black people and Jews with contempt and rejection.
