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.
Saul Modiano, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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 …
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Author: Rolando García / High Times
