Theodore Zeldin CBE (born 22, August 1933) is an Oxford scholar. Theodore Zeldin was born on the slopes of Mount Carmel on August 22, 1933, the son of Russian-Jewish parents who later chose to become naturalized British subjects.

His father was a civil engineer, an expert in bridge-building, a colonel in the Russian Czarist Army, and a socialist who rejected the Bolsheviks. Zeldin's mother was the daughter of an industrialist and she was a dentist who completed her training in Vienna. Escaping from the Russian Civil War, Zeldin's parents emigrated to Palestine, where his father worked for the British Colonial Service building railways.