Theodore Zeldin CBE FBA FRSL (born 22 August 1933) is a British academic and current Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford.

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.

Escaping from the Russian Civil War, Zeldin's parents emigrated to Palestine, where his father worked for the British Colonial Service building railways.

He was disappointed by the failure of the movement for Arab-Jewish solidarity, which he favoured together with other scientists and intellectuals, and of which the railwaymen's trade union was a vocal advocate.

He has been a Fellow (now Emeritus)[5] of the college since 1957 and was its dean for thirteen years, playing a lead role in developing it as the university's centre for international studies.