Currently Hibernate always scans classpath for the static metamodel. But not all projects make use of the static metamodel. For big projects (e.g. ca. 2000 entity and embeddable classes in our case) it takes a lot of time to scan the classpath for classes which do not exists. Therefore I propose a new setting "hibernate.static_metamodel.enabled" which would allow us to disable scanning the classpath for the static metamodel. If the setting is set to "false", then Hibernate will not scan the classpath for the static metamodel. The default value for the setting will be "true" to preserve current behavior of Hibernate.