In Soulless, the villains have a mysterious enforcer who turns out near the end to be an automaton that can be deactivated by erasing the word written on his forehead. And he's explicitly a clockwork steampunk automaton, and the word is in Latin, and there's a handwavy explanation of why the word is necessary to his functioning, but I find it impossible to imagine that Carriger arrived at that concept any way except by starting with a golem and then systematically removing the elements tied to the golem's Jewish identity.

Here's the page for the random selection methods: Randomize your TBR