Dubnow states that the Jewish people in the first Biblical half of its history "finally attained to so high a degree of spiritual perfection and fertility that the creation of a new religious theory of life, which eventually gained universal supremacy, neither exhausted its resources nor ended its activity." In its second "lackland" half the Jews were "a people accepting misery and hardship with stoic calm, combining the characteristics of the thinker with those of the sufferer, and eking out existence under conditions which no other nation has found adequate." For this people "the epithet 'peculiar' has been conceded" and Jewish history "presents a phenomenon of undeniable uniqueness."