[2] Levin married at the age of 17 and went to live with his father-in-law in the shtetl of Puchowitz, where he discovered the Chabad movement and diligently studied its doctrine and literature.

He initially advocated for emigration to the United States; in an October 1881 letter to the Hebrew weekly Ha-Magid, he wrote: "In the Holy Land our dream would be far from realized; there we would be slaves to the Sultan and the pashas.

[…] But in America our dream is closer to fulfillment, for the constitution of that country provides that when the number of colonists reaches sixty thousand they have the right to establish a separate state […] and our hope of attaining our independence and leading our lives in accordance with our beliefs and inclinations would not be long deferred.

[1] He publicly expressed agreement with Leon Pinsker's Auto-Emancipation,[6] and in 1884 translated into Hebrew Benjamin Disraeli's novel Tancred, which visualizes the return of the Jews to their land.

[8] At the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903, he was among the "Territorialists" who supported the plan to provide temporary refuge in British East Africa for European Jews facing anti-Semitism.