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In the context of his encounter with Nelly Sachs, Paul Celan writes in his notebook that he "hopes to be able to blaspheme to the very end." Paul Celan's complex relationship to Judaism is not only an existential fact, but also an important source of his poetry. In the following, I will focus on the poeticforms the specific potential ofpoetic language with which Celan holds respect and blasphemy towards his Judaism in a precarious tension and expresses them in poems that are both prayer and sacrilegious accusation. Before this dynamic is demonstrated and elucidated on the basis of two poems from the center of Celan's work, in which references to the Hebrew Bible are central, a quasi-private note from the context ofhis preparations for the Meridian speech, which Celan him self did not use or publish, is intended to express his complex relationship to Judaism and his view of its relation to poetry in the most condensed form.