Long before modern brands existed, a Sephardic merchant built a rolling-paper empire that stretched across Europe. His name faded, but his influence shaped how generations smoked, played, and lived.
Before monopolies and mass marketing shaped how Europe smoked, there was Saul David Modiano: a Sephardic Jewish industrialist who turned rolling papers and playing cards into a business that spread across Europe and the Mediterranean.
Born around 1840 in Ottoman Salonica (now Thessaloniki, Greece), Modiano came from a powerful merchant family descended from Sephardi Jews expelled from Spain in the 1490s. His ancestors settled in Salonica by the mid-1500s, becoming part of one of the largest Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire. That heritage stitched Saul into a web of Mediterranean trade, language, and survival strategies that would define his career.
Birth of a Merchant Prince
In his twenties, Saul left for Trieste, then the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s main Adriatic port. No one knows exactly why or how he got there, but one local legend claims he arrived after surviving a shipwreck. What’s certain is that Trieste, with its free port laws and multiethnic ferment, offered a multilingual and vivid stage for the tradesman.
In 1868, he opened his first shop on Via del Corso, selling imported cigarette rolling papers to feed booming demand. By 1873, Modiano was producing his own and becoming one of the first local manufacturers, breaking the dominance of French brands.
His papers were slow-burning, smooth, and sold in beautifully lithographed packets that mirrored the Art Nouveau explosion happening across Italy. Smokers across the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, and the Balkans knew the Modiano name. Royal courts used them. Dockworkers used them. Connoisseurs collected them.
Some workers claimed Modiano could smell a bad paper batch from across the factory floor.
And here’s where the story gets specific. Rolling-paper collector and historian Anton Mark Nelson argues that Modiano was already selling interleaved booklets by 1893 under the name CLUB in Trieste, before the Braunstein brothers made the system famous through Zig-Zag’s later patent-era legend. Nelson points to the Italian history book Trieste in fumo for the 1893 date and notes that Modiano patented the CLUB booklet in 1894, the same year Braunstein Frères filed their own. Whether you call it invention or early adoption, the claim lands in the same place: Modiano wasn’t just making papers, he was shaping how people used them.
By the 1880s, Modiano’s manufacturing operations expanded into lithography, box-making, and graphic design, and in 1884, he acquired the historic La Concordia playing card factory, which changed everything. He hired top-tier Italian illustrators, such as Marcello Dudovich and Luigi Cambon, to produce posters and decks that stood out in train stations, storefronts, and game rooms across the continent.
Engraving from the early 1900s depicting a view of the Modiano factory – Modiano Historical Archive, courtesy. The image appears on the website of The Jewish Community Of Trieste Museum
Those posters are probably better known in our times than Modiano himself.
By the early 20th century, Modiano operated factories in Trieste, Fiume (now Rijeka), Romans d’Isonzo, and Budapest, employing over 1,000 workers. Some families worked there for generations. The brand became synonymous with quality, from tarot decks to poker kits, objects of ritual in an age before plastic.
Modiano also ventured into glassmaking, founding a major glassworks near Istanbul (managed for a time by his son Daniel, who died there in 1897), as well as exploring cement manufacturing and early automotive and electrical industries.
Patriotism, War, and Personal Loyalties
Though born under the Ottoman crescent and living under the Habsburg eagle, Modiano dreamed under the banner of Italian unification. He became a naturalized Italian citizen and a quiet supporter of irredentism—the movement to unite Trieste with Italy. When World War I broke out, his position became dangerous.
In 1915, as Italy entered the war against Austria-Hungary, Modiano’s main factory burned, an event likely linked to the political tensions of the time.
He then fled to Bologna, where he resumed production in exile. After the war, when Trieste officially became part of Italy, Modiano returned, rebuilt his plant, and was hailed as a patriot industrialist.
After his death, his son Ettore carried on the company and honored his father’s legacy by founding the Casa di Riposo “Saul Modiano,” a retirement home for elderly Jews in Thessaloniki. Even sixty years after leaving Salonica, Saul’s memory returned home in stone and care. The Modiano company remained family-run until 1987, when it was sold.
Today, Modiano playing cards are still in production, sold across Europe and the Americas. They’re used by poker players, magicians, and families who probably have little to no idea who Saul Modiano was but who still hold his legacy between their fingers.
