@Zinnia #233822
It’s definitively the latter - while no one knows where he actually comes from (there actually are some credible juicy options), he loved to make up fanciful origins stories (in general a popular pastime among courtiers at the time), which included being a centuries-old immortal - a claim esotericists have latched onto hard.
PS:
Our German family name "Reitzenstein" means "Rollingstone" for a reason.
The name is not Jewish; we are "steins" for a different reason. We are stumbling blocks
Since names, especially that of noble houses, often include very archaic words, I could not dismiss it a priori, but quick research shows that the Reitz in Reitzenstein actually comes from the old female name Richiza. The family name Reitz is only related to this family of Frankish nobles in that it is a patronym referring to a short form for that given name (or rather, its male counterpart). And that name’s actual original meaning is “counsel”.
More obviously, this is not how noble family names work. They are not hereditary epithets, but refer to their ancestral seat (hence “von…”, “of…”; “zu…” designates a second residence the family later moved to), with “-stein” referring to a stone castle. Of course, it’s far more likely that she is the descendant of some 18th Century Mr Reitz who got knighted and thus got to attach the nobiliary particle (see Goethe) - assuming that “Von [sic] Reitz” is her family’s actual name and not one she adopted upon “discovering” her “true birthright”.
As for the Jews… “-stein” is a general German toponymic suffix not particular to the Ashkenazim. I mean, technically, the House of Reitzenstein could be said to be ‘stein for a different reason than other Reitzensteins, in that they are the family *of* the actual stone castle rather than *merely from* it or its town, but, problems with this distinction in itself aside, that would be overly pedantic, and furthermore, the difference is “noble vs commoner”, not “gentile vs Jew”. And finally… she is just von Reitz, no Stein at all.