I originally used version 4.3.8.Final. I found on stackoverflow someone with a problem that appeared to be the same as mine and his solution was to change the hibernate version to 4.3.5 and then I tried all the versions listed in "Affects Version" field and... I didn't notice that in version 4.3.5 I got my exception only in the browser, but not in actual server logs... it turns out that my browser simply cached the page containing the exception... Sorry for the false alarm. Hope you'll fix the bug in the next version of hibernate.
Thanks for the workaround.