This website presents an AI-assisted English translation of the Aruch HaShulchan, a comprehensive code of Jewish law authored by Rabbi Yechiel Michel Epstein (1829–1908). The translation now covers all four sections of the Shulchan Aruch: Orach Chaim, Yoreh De’ah, Even HaEzer, and Choshen Mishpat.
The current translation was produced using Google’s Gemini 3 Flash model (MINIMAL thinking level). The Hebrew source text was downloaded from Sefaria, and each seif was passed individually to the model with a detailed style guide specifying conventions for rabbinic titles, standard phrases, and transliteration of halachic terms. The total cost for the full corpus of approximately 24,000 seifim was $40.73.
A post-processing normalization pass was applied to standardize spelling variants (e.g. Shakh → Shach, Beis Shmuel → Beit Shmuel) and to normalize inconsistent renderings of halachic terms across 13,756 substitutions in 1,247 simanim.
Please note: This is an AI-generated translation. While we hope it serves as a useful resource to the community, AI can and does make mistakes. For halachic decisions, please consult a qualified rabbi and authoritative sources.
The overall translation quality is high. The model correctly handles rabbinic titles, standard phrases, Talmudic cross-references, and the legal argumentation style of the Aruch HaShulchan. The primary known limitations are:
A formal experiment comparing MINIMAL, LOW, MEDIUM, and HIGH thinking levels found that core translation quality is broadly equivalent across all levels, though higher levels are more consistent with the style guide’s transliteration conventions. MINIMAL was chosen for cost and speed: MEDIUM would have cost approximately $900 and taken 15 days to run.
Special thanks to my father, Rabbi Michael Broyde, and Emory University’s Law and Religion Center, which funded the model calls for this project. Thank you also to Sefaria for publishing the original Hebrew text.
This work was also inspired by my father’s translation of the Aruch HaShulchan on Hilchos Shabbos: Aruch Hashulchan in English, Chapters 242–292.
For questions or comments, please email Joshua Broyde at joshuabroyde@gmail.com.