Deutsch was born to a Jewish family in Haifa, Israel on 18 May 1953, the son of Oskar and Tikva Deutsch. In London, David attended Geneva House school in Cricklewood (his parents owned and ran the Alma restaurant on Cricklewood Broadway), followed by William Ellis School in Highgate before reading Natural Sciences at Clare College, Cambridge and taking Part III of the Mathematical Tripos. He went on to Wolfson College, Oxford for his doctorate in theoretical physics, about quantum field theory in curved space-time, supervised by Dennis Sciama and Philip Candelas.