I tried to create EMF in application deployed on WebSphere 9, but I get exception listed in attachment. This issue popped up when we migrated from Hibernate 5.0.9 to 5.1.4, it is reproducible with version 5.2.9 too.
Project with reproducer can be found it attachment. You may deploy built project to WebSphere manually or use Cargo plugin to do so. URL to invoke servlet reproducing the issue is "http://localhost:9080/was-hibernate/test".