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>Does anyone know anything about the ancestry of Julie
Hauke,
Princess of
Battenberg ? Her father was supposed to be a Jewish street peddler named Morris
Hock, a.k.a. Maurice
Hauck, later
Moritz Hauke...
I've checked the archives for the Usenet newsgroup called alt.talk.royalty about this (the subject of
Prince Philip's Jewish ancestry comes up now and then in that newsgroup) and found the following information.
Countess Julie von
Hauke was born in
Warsaw in 1825, and died at
Schloss Heiligenberg, near Jungenheim in 1895. She was created
Countess of
Battenberg in 1851, and later created
Princess of
Battenberg in 1858. Julie was a
Roman Catholic who converted to the Evangelical faith in 1875.
Her father was (
Johann)
Moritz, Count von
Hauke (
Hauck), a general in the service of the Russian empire. He was raised to the Russian nobility in 1826 (whence his title "Count"). Moritz, who was born in 1775, and died in 1830, was *not* a Jewish street peddler. His father,
Friedrich Karl
Hauke, was a lyceum headmaster. (A lyceum is roughly equivalent to a high school.) It does not follow that a headmaster would have a "street peddler" for a son.
Moritz's wife was Sophie
Lafontaine (born in
Warsaw in 1790, and died there in 1831). Her parents were
Franz Anton Leopold Lafontaine (an Austrian army surgeon) and Maria Theresia Kornely. This Maria Theresia was Hungarian, as stated on tombstone, which is in a
Roman Catholic cemetery in
Warsaw. (There isn't any mention of a conversion, and it is assumed that she was Catholic, not Jewish.)
According to genealogist William
Addams Reitwiesner, there isn't any solid information about Maria Theresia's ancestors, nor is there any evidence to support a Jewish ancestry for her. There are those who say her father was a certain Jewish fellow by the name of Nathan Adelkind. However, when you trace Adelkind's background, it goes "no further than an undocumented assertion by Adalbert
Brauer". According to Reitwiesner, "
Brauer published his version of the parentage of Theresa Kornely, namely that she was a daughter of a Joseph Kornely, a baptized Jew who had been born Kornely Adelkind, which would make Julie
Hauke either 1/8 or 1/4 Jewish. When asked for evidence, all
Brauer could say was that this was the story as he had heard it, and that the evidence had been either destroyed or suppressed. No evidence to support this view has been produced either." (Source: From: William
Addams Reitwiesner (wrei@127.0.0.1) / Subject: Re:
MARKUS DE KORNELY?????????????????????? / Newsgroups: alt.talk.royalty / Date: 13 Oct. 1997)
In conclusion, it would seem that
Countess Julie von
Hauke does not have Jewish ancestors.
