This one may be a little esoteric, but perhaps someone is expert enough on the Hesse-Kassels in the late 18th/early 19th century for this.
I found the following curious statement about General Julius von Haynau in Wikipedia: that he was "the illegitimate son of the landgrave (later elector) of Hesse-Kassel, William I and Rebecca Richter, a Jewish woman".
All other sources that I know of have von Haynau's mother, William's mistress, as Rosa Ritter, also known as the "Frau of Lindenthal". As far as I could gather, Wikipedia based it's biographical entry on the 1911 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica (an edition old enough to be in the public domain). Later editions seem to have dropped the reference to the Jewish Richter.
Could it be that Rosa Ritter and Rebecca Richter are one and the same? And that the notorious General, who among other things is thought responsible for massacres of Jews in Hungary while putting down the 1848 revolt, was himself of Jewish ancestry?
Does anyone have any idea what information the authors of the 1911 Britannica might have based their geneology on? Or know anything else about the mysterious Rosa Ritter?
