Journalists I know joke that the only Jewish historian they ever need to call is Jonathan Sarna.

Jews and the Civil War? Sarna knows where the bodies are buried.

Need a quote about Jews and bagels? Sarna will give you one with everything.

The history of American Jewish prayer? Amen.

That Sarna is quoted on so many topics is probably a sign of laziness on the part of the reporters, but it is also a testament to Sarna’s dominance in the field of American Jewish history.

The Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University, Sarna has been a force in his field almost since he first got his doctorate at Yale University when he was 24. His magisterial 2004 book, “American Judaism: A History,” is considered the definitive work on the subject.

Now, at 70, Sarna announced he will officially retire from teaching duties after 35 years at Brandeis, and will focus on research and writing. He’s looking to complete a book about Mark Twain and the Jews, and has plenty of other projects in the works. The Twain book will be the third in a sort of 19th-century trilogy, following works on Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.

“I’ve never met a professor who said, ‘Oh, I wish I’d gone to two more meetings,’” Sarna, who has survived a number of health scares over the years, said in a recent interview. “But I’ve known a lot of professors who say, ‘Oh, I wish I’d written this book or that article.’ I felt that whatever time I have, devoting it to research and scholarship would really be what I wanted to do, and I’ll let other people handle the university. There’s a lot of politics at universities nowadays.”

Sarna’s decision to step back has allowed him to enjoy a sort of victory lap. He received an honorary degree and delivered the undergraduate keynote address during this year’s commencement exercises at Brandeis — 50 years after he graduated there with a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in Near Eastern and Judaic studies.

Last month the Maimonides Fund and the American Jewish Historical Society hosted a symposium in his honor, mostly featuring talks not by fellow academics but by rabbis and Jewish communal leaders who explained how his ideas and influence extended beyond the Ivory Tower.

His academic contributions were celebrated, meanwhile, at a daylong event at Brandeis in May, featuring a number of leading American Jewish historians, including Michael Cohen of Tulane, Zev Eleff of Gratz College, Sylvia Barack Fishman of Brandeis, Pam Nadell of American University and Laura Liebman of Princeton.

In her remarks, Nadell spoke about one of Sarna’s most important contributions to the field: a series of books and articles that put antisemitism in the American context. In papers like “The Pork on a Fork: A Nineteenth Century Anti-Jewish Ditty” (1982) and “Anti-Semitism and American History” (1981), Sarna refuted the historians and Jewish leaders at the time who suggested that antisemitism was a brief and fading problem in American life.........

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