I am stuck on this issue today and did some digging on it. I found @Javi's answer helpful, but that did not solve my problem. A few dozen more minutes of the search query made me find out the following:
Hibernate validator version 4.0.2.GA (and probably also in others) detects the JPA version of the javax.persistence.PersistenceUtil class , because this class does NOT contain in JPA 1, but it is in JPA 2. Unfortunately, some libraries implement this class, which makes Hibernate a bit confusing. In this case, he tries to use JPA 2 also in Java 1.5, which throws the exception mentioned in the question.
The solution is simple. Find out the library by adding this class and deleting it. In my case, it was ejb3-persistence-1.0.1.GA.jar . This error was registered a long time ago, and in the version ejb3-persistence-1.0.2.GA.jar it is fixed. There, this update solved the problem in my case.
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