Public dataset of all Sefaria texts, hosted on Google Cloud Storage.

This repository is a lightweight index and set of tools for accessing the Sefaria text corpus. The actual text data (~26GB, ~85K files) lives in a public GCS bucket and can be downloaded without authentication.

# List top-level formats and directories
./examples/browse_bucket.sh

# Drill into a specific category
./examples/browse_bucket.sh json/Talmud

curl -O "https://storage.googleapis.com/sefaria-export/json/Tanakh/Torah/Genesis/English/merged.json"

# Using the helper script
./examples/download_category.sh Talmud          # all Talmud in JSON
./examples/download_category.sh Mishnah txt     # all Mishnah in TXT

# Or directly with gcloud/gsutil
gcloud storage cp -r "gs://sefaria-export/json/Talmud/" ./talmud/
gsutil -m cp -r "gs://sefaria-export/json/Talmud/" ./talmud/

gcloud storage cp -r "gs://sefaria-export/" ./sefaria-data/

import requests

books = requests.get(
    "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Sefaria/Sefaria-Export/master/books.json"
).json()

# Find all Talmud texts
for book in books["books"]:
    if "Talmud" in book["categories"]:
        print(book["title"], book.get("json_url"))

Or use the ready-made script:

# Download all English Mishnah texts as JSON
python examples/download_from_books_json.py --category Mishnah --language English

# Download a specific title
python examples/download_from_books_json.py --title "Genesis"

# List what's available without downloading
python examples/download_from_books_json.py --category Tanakh --list

The GCS bucket is organized hierarchically by format, category, title, language, and version:

gs://sefaria-export/
  json/{categories}/{title}/{language}/{versionTitle}.json
  txt/{categories}/{title}/{language}/{versionTitle}.txt
  cltk-full/{categories}/{title}/{language}/{versionTitle}.json
  cltk-flat/{categories}/{title}/{language}/{versionTitle}.json
  schemas/{title}.json
  links/links0.csv ... links12.csv
  table_of_contents.json

json/Tanakh/Torah/Genesis/English/merged.json
json/Talmud/Bavli/Seder Moed/Shabbat/Hebrew/merged.json
txt/Mishnah/Seder Zeraim/Mishnah Berakhot/English/merged.txt
schemas/Genesis.json
links/links0.csv

Each text directory includes a merged file (e.g., merged.json, merged.txt). This file combines the maximal content available from all versions, using Sefaria's merging logic. When a single complete version exists, the merged file is a copy of it. Use merged files when you want the most complete text available.

books.json is an index of every text in the bucket. Each entry contains:

{
  "title": "Genesis",
  "language": "English",
  "versionTitle": "merged",
  "categories": ["Tanakh", "Torah"],
  "json_url": "https://storage.googleapis.com/sefaria-export/json/Tanakh/Torah/Genesis/English/merged.json",
  "txt_url": "https://storage.googleapis.com/sefaria-export/txt/Tanakh/Torah/Genesis/English/merged.txt",
  "cltk_full_url": "...",
  "cltk_flat_url": "..."
}

This file is regenerated monthly (2nd of each month, day after the GCS export) by a GitHub Action. It can also be triggered manually from the Actions tab.

• Sefaria-Project - Sefaria's main application source code
• Sefaria API - REST API for accessing Sefaria data programmatically

See LICENSE.md.