need some suggestions for not!Hebrew and not!Judaism

So one of the things I'm doing with the new series is basing the dominant ~European religion on Judaism, instead of going with the usual default of pseudo-Christianity. Which leads, of course, to me having to make lots of decisions about random worldbuilding details. I'll talk about those more later, probably -- I'm having an interesting time extrapolating both a nineteenth-century form of Temple-based worship, and a widespread state-religion form of rabbinic Judaism -- but one of the most obvious flags on the reader's end is the names of things.

See, in light of the aforementioned extrapolations, I don't want to make the reader think this is supposed to be straight-up Judaism, as it was practiced in the real-world nineteenth century. Because of this, and because the main character comes from a British-equivalent country, I'm mostly using English-language variants on the Hebrew names for things; for example, they have a holiday that corresponds to Purim, but I'm calling it "the Casting of Lots" instead. (Insert lots of thoughts here about how English terms and concepts from Christianity are often unmarked and can therefore be read as "generic," but terms and concepts from other religions are marked and therefore assumed to be referring specifically to the real-world version.)

This method currently falls down in two particular places: the name for the ~Hebrew language, and the name for the religion itself. My current placeholder for the former is "Ivrit," which is, yes, the name of Hebrew in Hebrew. (Presuming Wikipedia hasn't lied to me.) I cannot keep this, unless I want it to be an in-joke for the Hebrew readers in my audience. The current placeholder for the latter is "[Judaism]," because the one time I referred to the religion as a whole I was tired and just wanted to get the night's writing done instead of bogging down on naming. I cannot keep this, period.

Suggestions for either one? I can't read the Hebrew alphabet well enough to do my usual thing, which is to look up semi-random words and then fiddle with them until I get something I like. The language could be based on the real Hebrew word for "speech" or something in that vein, following the common tendency in some parts of the world for a tribe's name to simply mean "the People." The religion . . . I dunno. A currently-unsold book idea of mine has already laid claim to the word "Messianism," which I kind of feel works better for ~Christianity anyway, given the different attitude toward the whole Messiah thing. I need something that can be used to refer to both the Temple-based form of the religion and the rabbinic offshoot (which in this setting occupies the role of the Protestant Reformation, in terms of dividing up ~Europe along religious lines.) Not sure what would work for that.

Any ideas?

Thanksgiving Advent, Day Ten: Alternative Pizza Sauces

What? I never said all of the things I'm thankful for were going to be meaningful.

In this case, I am grateful for alternative pizza sauces. I am currently chowing down on a pizza crust that bears cheese, chicken, spinach, and pesto sauce. I could have had creamy garlic instead, and next time I may go for that. Mmmm, garlic.

Why am I thankful for this? Because when I lived in Bloomington, pizza was very nearly the only food you could get delivered.* And my friends and I gamed a lot, or watched movies, and the result was a whole lotta pizza ordering. Much to kniedzw's sadness (because he could eat pizza every night and be happy), after six years of this, I became so very tired of pizza that I almost never wanted to eat it. Three years on, I'm slowly regenerating my interest -- but that's helped a lot by restaurants that offer me greater variety in my choice of sauces. See, if it's got a non-tomato-based sauce, it's enough Not Like Pizza that I'm more willing to consider it. This, incidentally, makes not just me but my husband happier, and those are both good things.



*Except for Baked! And here I'm going to go on a tangent and talk about something I miss a great deal, and would be thankful for if somebody else would seize upon the WORLD'S BEST IDEA and make it available where I live.

Baked! was a restaurant that would, until about two or three in the morning, bake you custom-ordered cookies and deliver them to your door. Fresh. Hot. And you don't even have to get off the couch. You could choose your dough (sugar, chocolate, oatmeal), your fillings (chocolate chips, raisins, nuts, etc), a frosting if you wanted it. I adored sugar dough with dark chocolate chips, craisins, and walnuts. You had to order at least a dozen cookies total, I think, and the minimum for any given flavor combination was three -- but like that's a hardship.

And yeah, the name was no accident; the business was basically run for stoners, by stoners, and sometimes forty-five minutes after you placed your order you'd get a phone call from a spacey-sounding driver who couldn't find your house and turned out to be on the wrong side of town. But you know, that's a small price to pay for fresh cookie delivery. Why this has not taken over the world, I don't know.