its signing. Among these were the Protestant and Catholic Greeks, the Arabs, Albanians, Russians, Serbs, Romanians of the Greek Orthodox religion; the Albanian, Bulgarian, Greek Muslims of Epirus, and the Turkish-speaking Greek Orthodox. In Thessaloniki, which was the largest Jewish city in the Balkans, competition emerged between the Sephardic Jews who spoke Ladino and the refugees for jobs and businesses. Owing to an increase in antisemitism, many of the Jews of Thessaloniki became Zionists and immigrated to the Palestine Mandate in the interwar period. Because the refugees tended to vote for the Venizelist Liberals, the Jews and remaining Muslims in Thrace and Macedonia tended to vote for the anti-Venizelist parties. A group of refugee merchants in Thessaloniki founded the republican and anti-Semitic EEE (Ethniki Enosis Ellados-National Union of Greece) party in 1927 to press for the removal of the Jews from the city, whom they saw as economic competitors. However, the EEE never became a major party, though its members did collaborate with the Germans in World War II, serving in the Security Battalions. The heterogeneous nature of the groups under the nation-state of Greece and Turkey is not reflected in the establishment of criteria formed in the Lausanne negotiations. This is evident in the first article of the Convention which states: "As from 1st May, 1923, there shall take place a compulsory exchange of Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox religion established in Turkish territory, and of Greek nationals of the Moslem religion established in Greek territory." The agreement defined the groups subject to exchange as Muslim and Greek Orthodox. This classification follows the lines drawn by the millet system of the Ottoman Empire. In the absence of rigid national definitions, there was no readily available criteria to yield to an official ordering of identities after centuries long coexistence in a non-national order. Displacements The Treaty of Sèvres imposed harsh terms upon Turkey and placed most of Anatolia under de facto Allied and Greek control. Sultan Mehmet VI's acceptance of the treaty angered Turkish nationalists, who established a rival government at Ankara and reorganized Turkish forces with the aim of blocking the implementation of the treaty. By the fall of 1922, the Ankara-based government had secured most of Turkey's borders and replaced the fading Ottoman Sultanate as the dominant governing entity in Anatolia. In light of these events, a peace conference was convened at Lausanne, Switzerland, in order to