Catholics should not try to convert Jews and should work with them to fight antisemitism, the Vatican has said, in a major new document that draws the church further away from the strained relations of the past.

Christianity and Judaism are intertwined and God never annulled his covenant with the Jewish people, said the document from the Vatican’s commission for religious relations with Jews.

“The church is therefore obliged to view evangelisation to Jews, who believe in the one God, in a different manner from that to people of other religions and world views,” it said.

“In concrete terms this means that the Catholic church neither conducts nor supports any specific institutional mission work directed towards Jews.”

It also said Catholics should be particularly sensitive to the significance to Jews of the Shoah, the Hebrew word for the Holocaust, and pledged “to do all that is possible with our Jewish friends to repel antisemitic tendencies”.

“A Christian can never be an antisemite, especially because of the Jewish roots of Christianity,” it said.

The report, which does not constitute a formal change to official Catholic doctrine, was published to mark the 50th anniversary of the close of a landmark Vatican council that attempted to draw a line under centuries of persecution of Jews based on Catholic teaching.

The council, widely known as Vatican II, disowned the concept of collective Jewish responsibility for the crucifixion of Christ, decried antisemitism, emphasised the shared heritage of the two faiths, and launched a theological dialogue that traditionalists have rejected.

Dr David Kessler, director of the Woolf Institute for the study of inter-religious relations, in Cambridge, said it was the first time a repudiation of active conversion of Jews had been so clearly stated in a Vatican document.

He told a Vatican news conference that both sides had to “ensure the transformation in relations is not limited to the elite, but extends from the citadels of the Vatican to the pews of the Church as well as from the offices of the chief rabbis to the floors of our synagogues”.

The report also said that while it is only thanks to Christ’s death and resurrection that all people have the chance of salvation, Jews can benefit from this without believing in him. The authors appear to acknowledge that they are effectively squaring a theological circle, however, since how Jews can be saved while not believing in Christ “remains an unfathomable mystery in the salvific plan of God.”

Catholic-Jewish relations have been bolstered by the election of Pope Francis, who has a longstanding friendship with the Argentinian rabbi Abraham Skorka, with whom he jointly published a book of conversations about issues of ethics, morality and faith.