 <p>If there were no discriminator column in the target table then I guess you could still do it using the (non-JPA compliant) Hibernate annotation @DiscriminatorFormula.</p> <p><a href="http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/annotations/3.5/reference/en/html_single/" rel="nofollow">http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/annotations/3.5/reference/en/html_single/</a></p> <p>The JPA spec also allows for overriding/disabling JPA annotation processing via XML mapping files. I haven't really used this feature however see the following discussion which appears to suggest that you could convert the existing Entity to a MappedSuperclass via this mechanism. </p> <p><a href="http://stackoverflow.com/a/2516951/1356423">http://stackoverflow.com/a/2516951/1356423</a></p>