How can you add greater than or less than symbols to the condition on a Hibernate filter specified in the hbm.xml file? I am trying to add a filter to limit the collection to a specific date range: Unfortunately this breaks the XML parsing. I've tried backslash-escaping, "ge" and "le" and even "between :tstart and :tend" which is mentioned in the Hibernate documentation. None has worked, and I'll be damned if I can find any documentation whatsoever that specifically delineates the valid operators in the filter condition.