Seems that using generic way to tell hibernate to quote the table name is available using annotations but not for hbm files:

http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/orm/5.2/userguide/html_single/Hibernate_User_Guide.html#mapping-quoted-identifiers

The JPA Quoting syntax using \" is not allowed in a table name attribute of a hbm file. Using table="`role`" would be dialect specific.