The word “prudence” is a reworked word “chadzy” (haji) that came to us from the Turkish language. The title of "Khoja" was awarded to a person who made a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina - the cities sacred to all Muslims. Returning from a long journey, made out of motives of piety, this pilgrim had the right to put on a white turban - as a sign that he had approached the holy stone of the Kaaba. Since such people were universally respected in the Islamic world, many wanted to sign up for the Hajji not for the sake of getting to the holy land, but for the honors that their compatriots would shower upon their return.
In Russian, the word "prudence" had a negative meaning from the very beginning. This is how the Turks called people who revealed excessive piety, moralized excessively, taught how others should live, but in fact turned out to be very far from the ideals of the professed religion. Guardians of morality and morality sometimes turned out to be depraved and pedophiles, speaking in the style of extreme puritanism and rigorism lived inluxury and excesses.
But the Turks were not the first to discover that piety can be feigned. There are many testimonies in the Gospels about those who “pretend to pray for a long time” so that people can see it, and about those who “see a speck in the eye of their neighbor, but do not notice even a beam in their own eye.” Jesus Christ called such “priests” “Pharisees”, and proclaimed: “Woe to you!”, because they cleanse the outside, but inside they are full of malice and lawlessness. But "Pharisee" - the former meaning of the word hypocrite, was also not originally a synonym for hypocrisy. It was a class of especially devout rabbis who knew Torah and Talmud, "scribes". They taught in the synagogues, just like the Levites.
In English, prude is bigot, in German it is Scheinheiligkeit. As you can see, nothing from the Turkish Hodja 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 “empty sanctity” was used in parallel with “prudence”, but later it became archaic, and we know why: hypocrisy went beyond the plane of religion and moved into the area of integrity, morals, in a word, into the sphere of secular ethics.
a person who claims to be the guardian of the purest Puritan morals and the standard of morality and morality.
Interestingly, in the Western and American tradition, the word bigot is inextricably associated with racism and rejection of same-sex marriage. Thus, in the conditions of a “politically correct society”, the term “prudence” was transformed: this is the person who, foaming at the mouth, will prove that he is not a racist and respects the rights of gays and lesbians, while he would rather kill his daughter than allow her to marry black or marry a girl. American society knows many Rigorists who advocate that the mentioned words “Negro” and prohibit the play “Venetian merchant” of Shakespeare, because there is an inadulchanted word “Jew”, and for verification, is to prohibit the blackness of the “Venetian merchant”. and Jews with contempt and rejection.
