I'd worked so hard for that moment and it was so important to me because that was the time where I became a Jewish woman.

Hello, I'm Neil McGregor and in this series of podcasts I'm looking at objects to see how shared beliefs help shape societies and how individuals take their place in a larger community.

This episode is all about becoming an adult.

This is the BBC.

In the basement of the British Museum, in one of the few rooms that has a table long enough

for it to be rolled out on, I've come to see an object that's well over 250 years old.

Well, it's made of linen embroidered with coloured silks, but it also has sequins embroidered

into the letters and the sequins are made of silver-plated copper. So now, of course,

they've tarnished and we can't clean the silver, but originally they would have looked very

beautiful and sparkled. Beverly Nenk, curator of the medieval collection, has had rolled out for me

a three-meter-long Torah binder, a strip of cloth used in a synagogue to bind the scrolls of the Torah, the first

five books of the Hebrew Bible. But in fact, what I'm looking at in this piece of cloth, is the story

of a life, the ideal life of an 18th century Jewish boy. Originally it would have been a square

or rectangular piece of linen, which was used to swaddle the baby during the circumcision

when the baby was eight days old. And after the circumcision, it would have been cut into four

strips and sewn together. And then traditionally, the women of the household, the mother and the

sisters, would have embroidered it. It was sewn somewhere in Germany in 1750,

but the colours of the silks are still vivid,

but this is not just a beautiful piece of needlework

presented to the synagogue by a family grateful for the birth of a child.

This is an embroidered prayer,

covering every stage of the baby's life,

...