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March 18, 1644 - Oliger Paulli

Paulli occupied a peculiar and unsettling position in the religious landscape of late seventeenth-century Europe — a wealthy merchant who leveraged his resources and platform to promote an aggressive millenarian agenda centered on the forced or orchestrated return of Jewish people to the Holy Land. His publications stirred theological anxieties across religious communities, and his claims of Jewish lineage served to lend a self-appointed legitimacy to his campaigns. The harm lay less in direct action than in the volatile currents his zealotry fed into an already fractious era of religious politics.

From Wikipedia

Oliger (Holger) Paulli (18 March 1644 – August 1714), also spelt as Olliger Paulli, was a wealthy Danish merchant from an influential family, pamphleteer, religious fanatic, and publisher. He was renowned for his over-zealous activities for the return of Jewish people to their promised holy land.

He was well known for claiming his great-grandfather, "Simon Paulli (Sr.)", as a Jew and descendant of the royal line of David. His controversial promulgations and religiously fanatical publications such as The Dove of Noah and The Triumph of the Stone cut without Hands created hopes and theological tensions among major religions of those days.

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