Make is it's own thing, and not really tied to C in any way.
I've written more makefiles for Java projects when I despised Eclipse than for any other reason. I'm sure that's completely wrong and fucking awful, but it worked really, really well.
While I can somewhat sympathize with wanting to use make, it's the dependency management with Java that would be just horrible. Maven-based dependency management saves you a world of misery most of the time. And when you have conflicts to deal with it's 1000 times worse doing it by hand.
I've written more makefiles for Java projects when I despised Eclipse than for any other reason. I'm sure that's completely wrong and fucking awful, but it worked really, really well.