Jan Marius Nicolas Romein (30 October 1893 – 16 July 1962) was a Dutch historian, journalist, literary scholar and professor of history at the University of Amsterdam.

A Marxist and a student of Huizinga, Romein is remembered for his popularizing books of Dutch national history, jointly authored with his wife Annie Romein-Verschoor.

After a stay of seven months in Denmark, where Romein's friend and former fellow student Hans Kramers had become the assistant of the physicist Niels Bohr, the couple moved to Amsterdam in 1921.

In 1924 he received his doctoral degree, with the highest distinction, at the University of Leiden with the dissertation Dostoyevsky in the Eyes of Western Critics.

His most famous books include a history of The Low Countries (1934) and a four-volume work with 36 short biographies of important Dutch (1938–1940), both in cooperation with his wife and fellow historian Annie Romein-Verschoor.

In 2011 Jan Romein and his wife were posthumously awarded the title "Righteous among the Nations" by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, for offering a hiding place to two persecuted Jewish fellow-citizens during the German occupation.

[5] Soon after the beginning of the Cold War his marxist conceptions, though undogmatic, had placed him in relative isolation, and in 1949 he was denied entry to the United States for an intended speaking engagement at an international scholarly conference in Princeton of which he was one of the initiators.

(...) This work can be read with great profit by the highly educated general reader, the undergraduate history major, the advanced graduate student, and the professional historian.

[1] When internal struggles led to a Moscow-backed "palace revolution"[1] in 1925, Romein sided with Van Ravesteyn and David Wijnkoop, and as a result was forced out of the Tribune's editorial board.

[2] A year later, when a different professorship was vacant, Romein was appointed professor of Dutch history, this time with support from Wijnkoop and despite a vehement campaign against his candidature.

[7] He condemned the Soviet crackdown on the 1956 Hungarian uprising, in a pamphlet that simultaneously denounced the French and British involvement in Egypt during the Suez Crisis.