The cultural history of the golem has been the subject of considerable scholarly attention, extending not just to the literal history of the canonical works that created and spread the idea of the Golem of Prague, typically attributed to Rabbi Judah Low ben Bezalel mystically creating a creature from clay to protect Jews from being attacked due to "blood libel" rumors but also to tracing the wider popular culture circulation of the idea of the golem. Among other interpretations, scholars and writers have seen the golem as an indirect ancestor of Superman. There are also scholars who have argued that the golem is connected to robots (primarily via the 1938 film RUR) but that link has been contested by other scholars. The major point here is that the golem isn't obscure in the late 19th and 20th Century, really--it was a major popular culture icon at various points.

I have been looking quickly through some of the existing histories of Dungeons & Dragons to see if there's been much attention by intellectual or cultural historians to the sources that Gygax, Kuntz and Arneson or others were drawing upon in building the early monsters of Greyhawk and then the first edition Monster Manual. I don't think anybody's written about that; Scott Bruner's 2017 dissertation discusses the influence of key fantasy novels in the early development of D&D but not necessarily touching on the characteristic monsters. The striking thing about the D&D golem, as Robert Rath pointed out in an essay on The Escapist in 2014, is that the D&D golem has been completely stripped of its Jewish connections. Early D&D campaigns did not feature Judaism, Christianity or Islam directly, though there were oddities like vampires being put off by crucifixes and so on.

But that example just reminds me that the early Monster Manual (and Greyhawk before it) was a kind of dog's breakfast in terms of the sources of inspiration--they grabbed all the monsters they could think of, from multiple folkloric and fictional sources. I think the "golems are created by magicians" is a secularization of the original Golem of Prague concept, which featured kabbalistic spiritual magic. I'm not sure whether the early creators of D&D were very conscious of the source they were borrowing from--they could simply have been remembering vaguely various films or books that had golems or golem-like characters.

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Barzilai, Maya. Golem Modern Wars and Their Monsters. New York: New York University Press, 2016.

Bruner, Scott M. “Constructing a Canon for ‘Dungeons & Dragons’: A Generative Analysis of Gary Gygax’s Appendix N.” ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2017.

Kieval, Hillel J. “PURSUING THE GOLEM OF PRAGUE: JEWISH CULTURE AND THE INVENTION OF A TRADITION.” Modern Judaism 17.1 (1997): 1–24

Laycock, Joseph P. Dangerous Games : What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says About Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds. 1st ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015.

Lund, Martin, "American Golem", in Pustz, Matthew. Comic Books and American Cultural History : an Anthology. Ed. Matthew Pustz. London ;: Continuum, 2012.

Rath, Robert, "How Did Golems Go From Jewish Mysticism to D&D Icons?", The Escapist, October 16, 2014. https://www.escapistmagazine.com/how-did-golems-go-from-jewish-mysticism-to-dd-icons/